Into Other Worlds

February 6, 2023

For the last two years, I’ve been living on the edges of society, creating in relative solitude, within the quiet gorges of Adnyamathanha country. There’s a purity within silence, a clarity that reveals itself. And yet there’s an honest brutality to this life.
To live within these towering mountains and experience each new experience with time, patience and presence, reveals intense detail and connection, the crucial elements of my process.

After 16 months of introspection, within solitude, the investigation of self and practice is now at a conclusion. And yet it’s not really a conclusion but a turning point in the artistic path.

This time has been evolutionary. I’ve never sat with purpose, for such a concentrated time. There has been a lot of things that have been left behind, accompanied by revision of assumption and a newfound strength of clarity.

 It’s terribly painful to interrogate oneself

I found the concentrated self-development led to the removal of meaningful expression.

What do these works even mean without a why? Why even make works at all?

Nihilism crept in on all fronts and I became to see these works as meaningless. That was until I began to view them as markers of progression. A guide through the fog of unconsciousness toward the next stage of my artistic path. A shedding of obsolete things that I had dragged along with me.

Along the way I discarded personal mythology, striped and rebuilt structures and processes.

READING LISTS
Existentialism Is a Humanism
_{Being and Nothingness – An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology}
From Strength to Strength
Bronwyn Oliver – Strange Things
Something Rich and Strange – Selected Stories by Ron Rash
Self-Reliance – Ralph Waldo Emerson, 

PODCASTS
Stephen West

The show opened at Yarta Purtli on Barngala Country, January 7th and has now travelled to Yarta Puurli (Port Adelaide) on Kaurna Land.