Month long residency at Museum of Brisbane, working on developing Mammoth and new painting based on the poetry Nathan Shepherdson.
During this residency I have been working on a continually growing artwork titled Mammoth. The words are painted simply with black paint on sheets of paper, and then space around the letters is filled in, so that only the internal shapes of the letters remain. In this way the text is abstracted to a series of triangles, circles, squares and rectangles. When hung together in a grid this abstracted text swells into rhythms and patterns.
The text fragments are drawn from disparate topics; from my partner Monica’s work as anthropologist, to geology, physics, climate change, neurology, and poetry, especially the poetry of Nathan Shepherdson. I’m drawn to Nathan’s humanized mathematics, his tender awareness of the absurdity of being, an absurdity adrift in a complex of infinities, both personal and universal.
This residency has given me the opportunity to work more closely with Nathan towards a collaborative series of text paintings, based on the Australian fisherman’s bible Grant’s Book of Fishes, by Ern Grant. Some of the studies for these paintings are also floating in the Mammoth.
