07 Aug You make do with what you have

Looking at the large scale works, messy and cathartic, they’re not where I am today. Moving away from the landscape of the tree I can take it and frame it in small, hand-sized sections. It’s no longer overwhelming but is a small part of all the other places. I have a single sheet of my favourite Arches 300gsm paper left. It is earmarked for a commission but the art stores I usually use are closed and shipping is taking so long – with delays at Melbourne’s ports. If I take what I have, halve it and fold it, wet and score along the creases, halve it again and the options multiply. I’m left with 4 sheets, rough-edged and torn, parts of a single sheet but now their own discrete stories.

In the studio, I have hundreds of images, thousands of glimpses of memories and associations with my experience of the seeping tree landscape. If I stare hard enough, divide the image into small enough pieces and replicate them can I capture exactly what I know is there? The ruler divides the page in relation to itself; it has always been a way of focusing, of staving off anxieties and restlessness. Taking a ruler, a protractor, a compass, dividing pages up if slightly off-kilter patterns. Enjoying where the lines don’t quite meet. The tiny glitches in what should be measured and clean. As a child, I sat at my nana’s table, heavy wood, blue velvet, horse head cushion, placemats with maybe Gainsboroguh reproductions (was it Blue Boy?), and drew for hours with the implements from a small tin. Circles within circles, arcs and bisections, ruled lines dividing into smaller and smaller grids and patterns.

These works come from this place. Erasing mistakes and missteps, shifting boundaries, letting the landscape spill out into something else. breaking its neat patterns, leaving spaces where it doesn’t touch the edges. If I line them up can the dialogue between them form the story of embodied experience? Working with the paper I have, with the ruler I have dividing the page into a grid of days, of counted down minutes and instances, with the images I have piling up in literal and virtual piles around me, with my own tools of grappling with thoughts that are too big. You make do with what you have,