The playful insanity of art
Something I often think about when I'm out making art is what on earth some random hiker or traveller would make of what I'm doing.
This picture is from a recent trip to Sturt National Park where I experimented a lot with using backdrop paper (the long white paper I'm holding) to isolate and frame elements of fencing, plants and other things.
Each day, I would drive out to segments of the park, hang up paper and take photos. The desert is windy, so I needed all the clamps on my shirt to hold the paper to the fence, and I needed my flyscreen hat to keep the 100s of flies off me. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I was often covered in flies - my hands, my shirt, my back, everywhere. Only the net stopped them pushing into my eyes, earns, nose and mouth. My girlfriend has discovered a dead fly or two in our car and, frankly, I'm amazed there's one that few.
Anyway - art is sort of insane. As an artist you engage in these very bizarre actions that don't make much sense, with the hope that the product of that process will be interesting, amazing, fascinating, worthwhile. But the process itself is difficult to explain. Sometimes people, say my Dad, will ask 'what do you do when your out making art?' and it's like such a good question that's really hard to answer.
In some ways I just follow my nose, hunting and looking for things to take photographs of. I also engage in experimentation and play - trying weird and wonderful things in the hope some turn into good photos. For example, I've dug up broken bottles, picked thorns from dried bushes, walked around with an A2 piece of cardboard - all as a form of experimentation. It's sort of beyond short-hand explanation and it also doesn't really matter - it's all in service of having fun and making things. But for an external viewer, the results are really the important part.
One of the reasons I'm drawn to making art work far from home is the isolation. I feel uncomfortable making work around people - lugging all this kit to a suburban park, for example, would draw ire and looks from passers by and those would result in me rushing, taking short cuts or just not doing the most random things. But away from everyone it feels like the world is my diorama and I can mess around and change it as I like. For me that pressureless freedom often results in better work. I think at least.
Art making is freedom, to me. Freedom to do and make whatever I want. That is the source of the joy, the source of the excitement, the course of the motivation. I can be out in the desert weighing down stupidly large pieces of paper with rocks, I can be making a sound recording of an empty field, I can be lugging kilos of glass back to my backdrop, picking thorns from my clothes, chasing feral pigs and piling dust up. It's all part of the process and it's all the most exciting part of my holiday.
But it doesn't make sense. There's nothing sensible, efficient, explainable or clear about this. It's just productive exploration, structured fun, open creativity, messy collaboration with the world.
But I can't imagine what it looks like to someone else. Do they think I'm an expert? A crazy man? A cooked unit? Who knows...
Here's some other images of me out in the field.