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Coastal Collage

 

As an object of aesthetic revery, the micro-environment of the coastal rock pool presents a paradox: inducing stillness and an awareness of timelessness in the beholder, and yet perpetually changing through daily tidal cycles and long processes of erosion. The animator engaging with the coastal rock pool as visual imagery encounters the challenge of creating a contemplative experience, implying stillness, without negating either animation's inherent tendency towards linear movement or the perpetual sense of flux that is characteristic of the rock pool. The painted collages in this exhibition are a first means towards solving this problem. The exhibition of 14 selected mixed media works on paper were produced in direct response to particular sites on the East Coast of New South Wales. They utilise layers of painted, weathered paper and linear drawing, applied through a process of experimental transposition, to encapsulate transition within a still form. Drawing on a tradition of abstract collage pioneered by Modernists such as Henri Matisse and Robert Motherwell, they stand as a self-sufficient body of work, but their larger purpose is as a starting point for an animated work in which movement and projection will produce an advanced aesthetic articulation of a complex natural environment.