Thought Factory - Gary Sauer-Thompson's website

coastal, exhibitions, rocks, South Australia

SALA 2019: Swatch at Fabrik

July 16, 2019

In contrast to previous years I have a minimal presence in the carnivalesque 2019 SALA ( South Australian Living Artists) Festival. This festival can be interpreted as a reworking of Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque as popular festivities and rituals as a form of celebration that has been successfully transposed into the visual arts in South Australia.

I am part of a salon style hang of a multiple medium exhibition at Fabrik in the Adelaide Hills that is entitled SWATCH. The curatorial concept behind SWATCH is that artists exhibit “a small sample [up to 3 9×9 inches images] that demonstrates the look of a larger piece– artists are asked to consider how they would represent their practice (their style, technique or subject matter) on a small scale.” I understand that as there are approximately 40 artists involved in Swatch, and probably around 120 very diverse works being exhibited, this style of exhibition can be interpreted as a curatorial response to Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque.

The idea of Swatch explicitly references the history of the Fabrik building. The building was once the old Onkaparinga woollen mill at Lobethal, whilst swatch refers to a small textile sample that is usually taken from existing fabric, and is designed to represent a large whole. The textile manufacturer would bring together many swatches of their materials into a single sample book, thereby enabling a salesperson to show a wide selection of available designs in various colours to potential customers without the necessity of having multiple rolls of fabric immediately to hand. So the Swatch exhibition of small works is equivalent to a sample book of many swatches of different materials.

I am exhibiting a series of 3 9×9 inch framed prints that were made on my coastal poodlewalks along the southern Fleurieu Peninsula, and which are a part of the Fleurieuscapes project. The series in Swatch is entitled The Light the Morning Brings’, and it is based on this post on the poodlewalks blog. These images are along the lines of immediate bodily relationship to the light on objects and processes using the lower or popular media of photography, and showing them in the context of the higher and more authoritative media of the visual arts.

One of these prints being exhibited is an image is of a rocky outcrop from a photo session at Kings Head, and it is similar in style to the granite and quartz outcrop picture above.

critical writing, Mallee, water

towards a critical climate aesthetics

May 11, 2019

This post on a critical climate aesthetics builds on this one at the Encounter Studio’s photoblog in the light of what has been currently happening in the lower Darling River region. There is some background here about why the Darling River has run dry. The general consensus is that state and federal governments have allowed way too much water to be taken from the system by irrigated agriculture, such as Big Cotton in Queensland and northern NSW.

The idea of a critical climate aesthetics underpins my contribution to the Unknown Futures section of the upcoming Mallee Routes exhibition at the Murray Bridge Regional Gallery in December 2019.

Over the last decade, scientists and humanists have renamed our current geological era the “Anthropocene” in recognition of the profound impact that human activities have had upon the earth’s crust and atmosphere. The argument is that the Holocene Epoch gave way to the Anthropocene Epoch in the mid-twentieth century, because of profound and lasting human changes to the Earth; and that there is no foreseeable return to the Holocene Epoch.

This argument would equate humanity with geological forces like glaciers, volcanoes, and meteors in the sense that the Anthropocene references an epoch in which humans are the dominant drivers of geologic change on the globe today. It wasn’t just drought that has caused the Darling River to dry up. The catastrophe was partly the result of human activity. This suggests that the Kantian sharp division between nature and culture or technology is no longer tenable.

landscape, roadtrip, topographics

the production of space

April 16, 2019

One way to think about history in relationship to the landscape, such as the Mallee landscape, is to adopt a geographical perspective, as geography is concerned with space and it has been informed by the idea of the production of space. This latter refers to how space has been made or produced in order to satisfy and expand human needs and possibilities. The key is to make or to produce space, rather than just to conceive it.

But it is more than this, Trevor Paglen describes this idea in the following way:

In a nutshell, the production of space says that humans create the world around them and that humans are, in turn, created by the world around them. In other words, the human condition is characterized by a feedback loop between human activity and our material surroundings. In this view, space is not a container for human activities to take place within, but is actively “produced” through human activity. The spaces humans produce, in turn, set powerful constraints upon subsequent activity.

The production of space takes us beyond seeing nature in terms of the impact of human habitation: ie., nature as ‘tamed’, ‘interpreted’ and ‘framed’, and as something deeply impregnated with metaphorical and poetic meaning.

architecture, camel trek, Flinders Ranges, history

history + photography

April 2, 2019

I have increasingly been turning towards the layers of history in my project orientated photography of the present. The presence of history in the present is a complex relationship, and in exploring it I have come face to face with the historical, foundational narratives in Australia.

These colonial setter narratives contribute to the creation of national myth of heroic solo-endeavour and human tragedy within a ‘harsh’, intractable and unforgiving environment in which only the bravest and boldest could survive.

For instance, the western historiography of heroic exploration in colonial Australia is generally understood within the grand narrative of struggling heroically against adversity’ in the search for more land for further settler expansion and settlement.

This is a fundamental part of colonial occupation and imperial expansion premised on the elimination of the aboriginal people and the wholesale appropriation of their land. The primary motive for elimination is access to territory. Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element.

New Zealand, publishing, urban, Wellington

Reconnections: Walking Wellington

March 7, 2019

I have spent the last couple of months working on the Reconnections: Walking Wellington project. This is based on my walking Wellington around the time of Photobooks/NZ in 2018 and on my previous visits. These visits were designed for me to walk Wellington.

It has initially been constructed in the form of a Tumblr blog. The blog is here and the project starts from the bottom of p. 4. The impetus for the project was Photoforum NZ’s recent open call for submissions for their online gallery (images of the project only), and then their call for submissions the form of a pdf for their publications programme (text plus images).

The blog was the easiest way for me to construct the project fragment by fragment, and it is also provides an accessible way for people to see the project in its embryonic form. The picture below is an outtake from the project:

Massey Uni, Wellington

There is another outtake here. Another outake is here.

If these submissions are not successful– I am assuming that they wont be, given both the nature of publishing in Australia and New Zealand and the strength and creativity of photography in New Zealand —then I have the basic draft for a new photobook. This time around I will submit the pdf to various book publishers. If I am not successful, then, and only then, will I consider publishing it on my own. I do need to explore the submissions route and experience the normal series of rejections. Continue Reading…

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