Solitude is the profoundest fact of human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone.
- Octavio Paz
Traveling alone is the best choice to enjoy solitude and to ease loneliness. We may refresh our spirit with what we see, smell and feel from the external environment on the journey. Documentary images serve as a relatively direct way of visualizing and preserving the memories of the journey. The moments preserved in video or photographic documentaries are therefore transformed into important asset for us to memorize precious moments in the course of our lives. However, in addition to preserving personal memories, how to make images the medium for communicating with the public, how to embed the transformation and perception of artistic language in images, and how to manifest the aesthetic value of images all seem to be greater challenges to the practice that treats personal travelling experiences as the subject of creation. Particularly at the time when image has become a common creative medium at hand, we can transform our travelling experiences into artworks through the digital cameras built in our smartphones. Thus, we may wonder that whether there is an alternative approach to present the contemporary imagination about the memories of journeys.
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North is a joint exhibition by six Sydney-based artists in SYD/DRW project, held in Northern Centre for Contemporary Art in Darwin. This project is a program of artist exchange between Sydney and Darwin, which presents the participating artists’ works created according to the two cities’ local contexts. Treating “journey” as its core concept, this project invites artists to transform their personal travelling experiences gained in Darwin into artworks in different ways no matter they grew up in Darwin but have to shuttle to Sydney for work or they are Sydney-based artists who participate in artist-in-residence programs in Darwin. Through this project, the most lonely and poetic aspect in the artists’ inner selves seems to be excavated by the journey and their creative process, which is also the aspect that is the most difficult to be expressed simply with images. Born in Darwin, the curator Harriet Body has been living and working in Sydney for years. This project invites Sydney-based artists to Darwin as residential artists on the basis of exchange, which allows the artists to take on the mindset of travelers and to narrate how the historical, political and geographical positions of Darwin or the Northern Territory influence the local residents’ lifestyle and cultural accumulation through their works.
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Darwin is a popular tourist resort in Australia. This area presents its great ethnic diversity by its proximity to Southeast Asia. In addition to the aboriginals and the Caucasians, many people migrated from East Timor, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, India, and Vietnam to Darwin, fleeing from the political turmoil in their homelands. Darwin is the bridge between Australia and Asia, if you will. Many Hakkanese from China migrated to East Timor in the early days, and subsequently became refugees due to the civil war. The Australian government decided to protect them by granting them Australian citizenship. Various political and historical factors made the Northern Territory an area of great ethnic diversity. In recent years, the implementation of working holiday policy made Asians and Southeast Asians the second largest ethnic groups following the aboriginals in Darwin. Such a development offers Darwin a great advantage in tourism because it allows tourists to simultaneously experience diverse cultures.
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In such a complicated context, Stella Rosa McDonald created The Wrong Island (2015) with acrylic cotton and paints, poetically recounting her journey across the surrounding waters of Darwin and her imagination about the city, as if she travels through space-time, recording her experiences and feelings of the journey from Darwin to the Timor Sea during the Second World War. The term “the wrong island” in her poetry insinuates the refugee problem caused by the war. The aquamarine paint and lines seem to symbolize the wet season in Darwin. In fact, water and rain are both essential to Darwin, a city almost surrounded by the sea. It is located in a peninsula adjacent to the North Territory and its advantage in geographical position makes it an important cargo port between Australia and Asia. Swimming, rowing and sea fishing are the most common leisure activities of the residents. In addition, there are only two kinds of climate in Darwin, namely six-month wet season and six-month dry season. Its mean annual temperature is around thirty degrees Celsius. This implies that the residents have to experience a half year of rainy days. The artist’s work is reminiscent of a sailboat traveling across the Timor Sea and bearing the hot and humid traces of Darwin’s wet season, which delineates her feelings about the journey as well as reflects the scenery and the time-space in a literary way.
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Treating the Second World War as the historical background, Belem Lett created the work Bang (2015) which takes on the form of sculpture to offer an imagination about the scenery of Darwin’s sunset. This work is an oval model made of oil, aluminum composite panel, pigment, and resin. It resembles a framed magic mirror on the wall, reflecting the mountains surrounded by mist that insinuate the bombing of Darwin’s waterfront during the war. On the other hand, the inflated plastic resembles a ring buoy commonly seen in swimming pools. The center of the water is supposed to be dyed by the sunset into gradient orange color but is actually replaced by the gradient green one. This work guides the viewers to imagine its center point by producing the visual effect of terraced slope. It invokes the metaphor of the sunset over the Timor Sea or Darwin’s waterfront to represent the bombs falling from the sky to the sea level and into the water. The oval shape of this work is also reminiscent of human pupils through which the artist gazes at the sea and watches people playing in the water. This work rekindles the memories of historical events during the war and the vicissitudes of the Empire.
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The ruins left by the war has become Darwin’s popular tourist attractions, accompanied by a riotous profusion of commercial developments ranging from museums, hotels and parks to all kinds of events held in the dry season. Highlighting the element of travel, Falling Out (2015) by Paul William and Territory Time (2015) by Siân McIntyre and Jai Pyne respectively show the artists’ observations on and experiences of this area. Painted with ink, acrylic paints and plaster on a sheet-like canvas, Falling Out symbolizes the backpackers’ figures and their experiences in Darwin. The imbricated strokes reflect Darwin’s wet season, sultry summer and ocean, beer and passionate revelry, which create an atmosphere as wild and humid as that in Kenting, Taiwan. Territory Time embodies the efflux in the Northern Territory by collecting the local music and ancient legends. It transforms the elements of life in Darwin into poetry and reinterprets it by combing contemporary electronic music with the singer’s voice in the night market at Mindil Beach. Presented in a simple way though, this work encompasses traditional culture, history, sightseeing, local characters, and digital electronic music. It is a soundscape which enables the viewers to imagine that they are on a tour in Darwin.
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Every traveler who returns home after a long period of travel tends to have mixed sentiments. Harriet Body’s works Earth Mark: Fragmented Circle (2015) and Discovery in Pond Four (2015) are paired works in which the artist transforms the items in her hometown into art and condenses her memories of her hometown with great nostalgia. That is, the artist introduces her hometown with the spirit of art. Reflecting mixed sentiments, the artist produced small ceramics with the red clay in her hometown and put a piece of rock crystal beside them. Then she hanged the paper darkened by the kilning smoke on the wall. The image on the smoked paper features the essential elements of the farm in her hometown, which resembles a picture as well as framed scenery. This work may evoke the artist’s nostalgia or arouse the viewers’ curiosity about the place. No matter what, it is created by the artist with her exceptional ability in perception that visualizes home, land, culture, and atmosphere.
In this exhibition, only Earth Mark: Fragmented Circle and Discovery in Pond Four present the desert life in the Northern Territory with dry red clay, because the wet season and the ocean remain the most significant characters of this area. Peter Nelson’s Expectations of Somewhere Else (2015) is a three-channel video installation presenting the rainy and misty tropical atmosphere with 3D animation. It creates the vagueness of speaking in the rain with vague conversations, which symbolizes the typical thundershowers in Darwin. The content of conversations sounds like chats about their hometown or just civilities. The unclear conversations perfectly demonstrate the defining character of Darwin’s climate. The uniqueness of this work lies in the transformation of the ambiguous area amidst the nature and the virtuality through the visual effect of digital animation. The ambiguous images of the environment seem to reflect the artist’s imagination about Darwin’s tropical scenery. The viewers may also find it reminiscent of the ethereal yet ephemeral ink splashes in Chinese landscape paintings. The key point here is not so much the content of conversations as the cultural environment and the life rife with heavy mist. Accompanied by the vague voice in the rain, to admire this work is to meditate with the artist. What unfolds in front of us is nothing but the rainy scenery as transient and ephemeral as a fleeting cloud.
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This exhibition systematically presents how art compiles and reflects travelers’ inner loneliness and imagination through the contemplation we make in our quotidian existence. The exhibited works vividly portray contemporary landscapes by ingenuously combining the most important elements of Darwin, such as sea, ship, sunset, war, rain, travel, noise, red clay, barren land and dessert in a retrospective manner. These works, whether they take the form of text, music, sculpture, painting, image, or digital animation, all revolve around the thematic concept of “traveling across foreign lands,” and thereby visualizes their creators’ experiences and perceptions of the artistic environment in the Northern Territory. Living in a foreign land and reflecting its aesthetic value with a traveler’s sense of solitude do constitute a monumental challenge as well.