Lloyd Godman
- artist journal - Dec 2005
-2006
During
a trip in December 2005 to Wilson's Promontory, which is the southern
most point of the Australian continent, I encountered the vibrancy of
the green regrowth under the burnt forest. Despite the fire, this was
photosynthesis in all its might. It was like a green luminous creature
that had emerged from beneath the earth to cover the naked ground, and
amongst it were the stark, black bones of the old forest still reaching
for he light. The chard remains of the trees that once dominated the
landscape stood as a legacy to an age before the fire.
The
regrowth was result of a controlled burn off that had got out of hand,
earlier in the year by Parks Victoria. Initial the land was scorched
to bare earth and ash.
I
was struck by the overpowering greenness of the new growth, and in places
how quickly nature had begun the process of renewal.
Every
so often, I worked on the images in photoshop enhancing the luminosity
of the green and made a few small prints. In April 2006 I was in an
art supply shop with some friends and browsed through the various materials
eventually coming across a stash of charcoal pencil. The black charcoal
brought back memories of the chard remains of the tree trunks at Wilson's
Prom and the idea came to combine charcoal drawing with the pigment
prints.
I
made a series of A3+ prints and began to draw on them with charcoal
(carbon), extending out from the tree trunks in the way I had with the "Drawing from
Nature" series of 1992. Eventually I decided to scale
the work up - to tile the image up to 9
X A3 prints, becoming a little freer with the pencil. In this work
a few prints had no drawing and I decided to experiment with embossing
photosynthesis formula into the spaces.
The
use of charcoal is a link to carbon as a material, and this also appeared
in a subsequent work in 2007, "Carbon
Obscura".
| This work based on the regrowth at Wilsons Prom was followed up in 2009 with the project entropy based on the bushfires in the St Andrews - Kinglake area. |
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