Biocrust, new work and when is an idea a good one?
Hello everyone. I know I'd said I'd be too busy to write a newsletter this week, but guess who has COVID? (symptoms are mild and I'm almost done isolating) So, I do have plenty of time.
Starting something new is a bit of a weird experience. Having finished, completely, the Killing Sink, I've had a few false starts on working on the next thing.
It's worth exploring how people work a little as a bit of background for why it's been a bit tricky for me to get started. Some folks just have a camera, take pictures of whatever and then eventually use their editing to build something cool. This would like an author going to the cafe, writing spontaneously everyday and gradually pulling different ideas and passages together. It's fun, to some extent, but you gotta do it everyday. For a few years I tried to do this and it didn't work for me, at all. So I'm much more of an ideas guy - I read, research, talk, work out what an interesting idea is then go and work out how that can be cool art. Or, if I was an author, I'd be spending that time thinking 'what kind of a story would be cool?' and plotting it out before writing it.
The problem with this is: you don't know how good and idea is till you get going. Lots of things sound great on paper but the execution isn't there, similarly, a simple and unimpressive idea on paper can be absolutely gorgeously made. For example, Jenny Holzer's idea, to reinterpret ancient wisdom into aggressively short sayings, sounds sort of bland. Yet the result is one of my favourite art pieces ever. I actually hand wrote a few of these and they sit above my PC at home. Simple idea, BRILLIANT execution.
The other hard thing about new ideas is that it takes awhile, even for good ideas, to get a bit of momentum behind them. I find that work in the early stages often feels very unsatisfying and underdeveloped. No shit! It's new! Of course it's underdeveloped. But this means I have a hard time distinguishing the difference between a good idea worth sticking with and a good idea that's not really worth pursuing. Last year, I devoted a lot of time to photographing the Murray-Darling Basin, especially the rivers that start in Victoria. I felt then, and still feel now, that the story of this watershed is upsetting, galling and calls for us to do a lot better. We are literally killing a system that sustains us - it's where 39% of agriculture comes from in Australia, and we're pumping it dry. Yet, when I looked back at the photos I made, they were sedate pictures of water. All the issues: overuse, misused, failed geoengineering, greed, corruption, the decline of the river's health - all of these, ironically, happen AWAY from the river. I even received a grant to work on this project but I just couldn't get it going. At least, not yet. A friend of mine and I occasionally talk about canoeing down the Murray, which I'd very much like to do one day.
Over summer I tried something new again, I wanted to make something about the ocean. I was really interested in how the ocean is so vast, scary, terrifying, but also a place of play, of military significance, of food, of leisure. It seems both untouchable and completely under fire by humanity. I spent a lot of time on the ocean photographing, trying to work out how to make anything. What I learned was that this will be a VERY long term project, it may take ten years. It's also technically really fucking hard to take a decent picture in the water, especially with the camera I was using (which I won't be using from now on). I also wanted to use portraits, but I am not good at sorting these out (I never ask people, never ask friends, so they don't happen). Still, I think this has legs, it just needs time.
However, recently I've had somewhat of a breakthrough with something new. For ages I've liked the idea of visiting a conservation refuge and spending time there photographing, but I needed more than that, I needed an angle, an in, a take: an idea. For ages, mulling about it, I just couldn't work out what to do. I don't really care for pretty pictures of a nice space, or at least that's not enough for me to be satisfied with my own work, so I had to push and think. What I landed on is that I want to photograph the LABOUR that goes into these spaces as a way of calling attention to the HARD WORK of stewardship and conservation. There's lots of images of cute animals and all that stuff, but the sweat, the fence building, the spreadsheet-making, the mundane, everyday, backbreaking, the weeding, all that stuff that makes it possible, THAT stuff isn't there, and I'm interested in it.
Last week I spent the week living on a conservation reserve in South Australia and took a ton of photos. I learned a lot about biocrust, which became a metaphor for what I was looking at. Biocrust is a collection of living plants (moss, lichen, etc) that sit on top of soil, laying dormant in dry weather and springing to life in wet. Biocrust prevents erosion, provides habitat and is incredibly important for biodiversity, yet it's easily destroyed, hard to see (for lay people) and easily overlooked. When learning about that I thought "yes! that's like why I'm here. I want to find this present, but easily missed, network of effort that builds these places and tries to re-balance the score a bit". I love that these people, and these spaces, are just rejections of cynicism that says 'humans should just leave it alone'. Guys, if we leave it alone we'll have cats, foxes and roos. That's it. We can't stop, we can only redirect and rebuild.
If you, or anyone you know, is working/volunteering in conservation/regenerative ag, etc I would adore it if you could let me know and I'd love to chat and maybe sort out photography.
That's where I'm at with new stuff, and it feels like it has legs. Yes. It's also a shift to colour and a new type of camera. These are many minor details to some, but for me it's a big shift to change what tools I use. I tend to be incredibly static with my tools: same camera, same lens, same film, same lab, same scans. Doing something in a new way after five years, even if it's a small change, is still a substantial experiment, and a fun one.
I hope you guys are finding something new to get excited about.
Matt
A few small updates:
If you're in Gippsland, 12 prints of mine will be on show at Gippsland Regional Art Gallery's Fragile Earth: Extinction show
If you're in Melbourne, I have a BIG SHOW that's opening in a month in Collingwood. This is a big deal and it's one of those events where I'll be saying 'every mother in the entire city should come for the opening'. July 1st, Oigall Projects. Chuck it on your calendar. You're invited. Biggest show yet.
The Killing Sink was written about here this week, which is quite nice.
You can (and should!) buy my book here