The Village Idiom- A sketchy situation.

It’s natural that our everyday life informs our art practice. While toiling over a hot artwork,

the inner dialogue that bubbles away chews over the experiences of the day: informing

and imbuing the artwork with incantation-like intent in our Blackheath studio.

One of the positive things about living on top of a mountain is our ready access to the

wilds. Walking through the wilderness is a funny meeting of opposites. For instance, you

must be careful where you place your feet as the ground is naturally uneven but at the

same time it’s imperative that you have a good look around, otherwise you may as well be

pounding away at a treadmill, you gotta enjoy the view! You are both within the scene and

observing the scene. It is a constant oscillation between scales: the micro and

macroscopic.

While strolling through the bush noticing insects, fungi, rocks and plants, you can also

observe human traces such as graffiti, cigarette butts and crushed drink cans; after the

bushfires of 2019 it was also possible to re-discover abandoned motor vehicles that had

been lying unnoticed in the scrub for decades. Due to the waxing and waning popularity of

certain walking routes, these hulking masses of metal had become lost through flora

regrowth.

The shifting of these paths makes it possible to both lose and rediscover what lies within

the wilds. It is a similar process that happens with thought and language: the changing

words and phrases we commonly use cause us to both misplace and re-discover ideas.

Idiomatic phrases such as Kick the bucket or Let sleeping dogs lie, hot-wires our mind by

expressing complex ideas swiftly without needing lengthy literal explanations. As Del the

Funky Homosapien says ‘We keep the funk alive by talking in idiom’.

Our latest show The Village Idiom is a visualisation of our perambulatory experiences of

the manmade and the natural. Our re-combination of nature motifs upon discarded metallic

objects harks back to celebrations of nature seen in Rococo ornamentation, Qing Dynasty

porcelain and Romani Vardo wagons. We live in an object design age of minimalism: the

visual whistles and bells have been Mari Kondo-ed into oblivion. Objects of contemplation

which celebrate harmony between man and nature are now the stuff of porcelain beer

mugs. The resulting vibe is clean but too austere for good mental health.

Objects like cups with nature scenes painted on them or horse-drawn wagons resplendent

in painted vines and flowers remind us that we are both within the scene and observing the

scene. The object becomes an aesthetic canvas and a philosophical vessel of

contemplation. The experience is summed up in Haruki Murakami’s Blowjob/Hegelian

scenario in Kafka on the Shore “A person is not merely conscious of self and object as

seperate entities, but through the projection of the self via the mediation of the object is

volitionally able to gain a deeper understanding of the self”

Not bad for a Walk in the Park, eh?