My Work.
BLACK ROCK SERIES
I’ve known Black Rock for many years. It hides in woodland on Mt Coonowrin’s talus apron among what the explorer Captain Cook, in an act of appropriation, later called the Glass House Mountains (in Queensland, Australia). It’s weird shape, layers, and fractures were a puzzle – how could this mass have rolled so far from its volcanic mountain? This rock gets me in and slowly shares its story. Shaped by storm, heat and slow creep, it rests on its pedestal, patterned by 100 year old lichens. Its twisted cooling cracks like honeycomb betrayed its molten lava origins as part of a volcanic dyke. Every visit and angle revealed something new: cloud, sun and rain, morning noon and evening. Lizards play on it, grass grows on it, leaves gather on cracks and ledges, cicadas and butterflies shed their wings there, ants make their home. Swirling she-oak, curly orange Kangaroo Grass, blue grey Lomandra live around its base. I’ve painted its surroundings too – Coonowrin and Ngun Ngun, all part of the ancient volcanic hotspot. The geology converges with the Dreamtime Aboriginal stories: these mountains are the ancestors Tibrogargen and his wife, pregnant Beerwah and their family, and the rock is perhaps a piece of that story.
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GLASS HOUSE MOUNTAINS
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ABSTRACTS
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KUREELPA FALLS SERIES
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This remarkable chasm and falls on a branch of the Maroochy River is a volcanic landscape cut by eroded dykes, with mysterious pools and forest. At the bottom of one of the falls I found a toy hippo, reminiscent of lost childhood, which appears in several images and goes on a tour of old haunts in South Australia.
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SUNSHINE COAST SCENES
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