Victor Harbor – Page 2 – Thought Factory

Fleurieuscapes Outtake: Petrel Cove

March 2, 2016

The beach region of the Fleurieuscapes had a minimal presence in the exhibition at Magpie Springs. Images, such as the one of Petrel Cove below, did not make the cut with the curators. Petrel Cove is on the south side of Rosetta Head, and it is a picturesque beach with rocky outcrops, which, despite a dangerous rip, is populated during the summer by surfers, recreational fishers, families and photographers.

It represents the pleasurable, freedom and recreation during the summer months without the stench of sewerage, piles of discarded condoms, human faeces, life savers, or racial conflict.

surfers, Petrel Cove

The Petrel Cove beach is usually empty during the late autumn, winter and early springs months apart from the odd surfer, dog walker, photographer, or lone fisherman. The place has a history of its rip regularly claiming the lives of those people who ignore the warning signs that signify the potential dangers. So Petrel Cove is not an unspoiled place that has a spiritual significance. Continue Reading…

colour, landscape, nature

beyond the pastoral mode

January 20, 2016

With the opening of the Fleurieuscapes exhibition at Magpie Springs done and dusted I have had bit of time to set up the various project galleries on the website properly. They now need to have more images added to the projects and I have started working on the Adelaide galleries, which are here, here and here.

I have also had time to begin to think about the Fleurieuscapes project and how I have been approach the work to date and where it needs to go. I have avoided the pastoral and the picturesque modes of the nineteenth century by concentrating on the formal aspects of the landscape. It is difficult to avoid the reduction of the landscape to a stereotype of bright sunshine and scattered gum trees in the high summer.

grass tree + pink gum

Admittedly, bright sunshine and scattered gum trees does break with the English pastoral of the Heidelberg School –the homestead paddocks with milking cows casting long shadows in early morning or twilight, as they grazed in cool temperate pasture of the Heidelberg School. The land had been successfully tamed by the settlers, and at Federation, they were celebrating their British moorings and their Anglo-Saxon heritage.

The picturesque mode relishes light and shadow, texture of grass, antiquated fences, dappled shaded cows. The picturesque was a European (English) aesthetic and Australian art was non-European and ‘unpicturesque’. This European landscape art is predicated on a widespread desire for disinterested enjoyment that precludes the direct lived engagement premised on an understanding of the actual ecology of places. It is predicted on an ‘outsider’s perspective’, rather than the experience of someone who lives in that particular place.

abstraction, black + white, coastal, exhibitions, nature, rocks

Fleurieuscapes: Outtake 3

January 12, 2016

This abstraction of the granite rocks at Kings Head, which is near Victor Harbor on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia, is another out take from the Fleurieuscapes exhibition at Magpie Springs. One reason for this image not making the cut is that I decided that there would be no abstractions in the exhibition, given my 2015 Australian Abstraction exhibition at the Light Gallery in Adelaide during the SALA Festival. Another reason for its exclusion is that the people helping me to curate the pictures for the exhibition judged that the image was too forbidding and austere. It was a part of the grotesque mode of expression in the visual art and it didn’t really fit in the exhibition.

This exhibition is part of the emerging trend in contemporary art photography in Australia and New Zealand that shows a marked and widespread interest in landscape. There has been a tendency to trivialise and overlook landscape photography, including the photography of wilderness.

rock abstract, Kings Head

The textual background to the exhibition is that the genre of landscape has been desperately unfashionable across the arts for so long, the preserve of the Sunday painter and the happy tourist snapper. While the photographic canon includes the greats of landscape photography, more recently photographers have tended to avoid a genre that is so easily linked to the vernacular (ie., happy snappers and tourism) and so difficult to connect to serious intent.
Continue Reading…

architecture, film, topographics, urban

Fleurieuscapes: Outtake 2

January 4, 2016

This image is an outtake from the 15 images that I have selected for my forthcoming Fleurieuscapes exhibition at the Magpie Springs Gallery in January 2016. A previous outtake from the exhibition can be seen on this post on the Encounter Studio blog.

Elephants trunk, Victor Harbor

Although I was quite partial to it, my friends who were kindly acting as de facto curators for the exhibition rejected it. I am sentimentally attached to the image as my architectural representations of Victor Harbor are few and far between. There isn’t that much to work with in this coastal township, architecturally speaking, and I thought it was a good way to explore the people, place, space theme of the exhibition. Continue Reading…

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