At the beginning of my time on King Island, I was feeling
quite despondent about the apocalyptic events dominating the world news. It had
been a year of Trump, #metoo, Greta Thunberg, endless gun violence, war, and
terrorism, culminating in the epic fires in Australia which continue to burn.
What was the point of making art? How could it possibly make sense to do so in
this world which seems to be imploding around us? It is hard to find a way
through the despondency towards hope. Over this period, I’ve watched online as
a lot of fellow artists struggled with the same despair.
I've found it interesting that my musings prior to my sojourn to
King Island focused on the matter of mortality, the cycle of life, and the
beauty of decay. This is precisely what the wild and fierce shoreline offered
me.
Kelp lay high on the dunes – black, cracked and crusted, as
if it had been burned – a fitting reference to the rest of the country being
consumed and destroyed by flames.
Further down it was dark and leathery, often
partially sticking out of the sand like emerging fossilised remains.
On the
tideline, kelp demonstrated the battle it had fought with the tide, as its
fronds stretched out exhaustedly towards the waves that had left them there.
Thick kelp
with lace-like networks of hole lay in elegant rolls.
Out on the rocks, kelp
clung wildly where it had been flung – sometimes metres long - like the desperate human detritus remaining after a big night.
The remains of an old dozer were rusting away into the rocks, being reclaimed bit by bit, hung with strands of kelp.
Further out
from the rocks where kelp remained cemented in place, it writhed and roiled in
the tide, looking like pasta on the boil.
In rockpools, kelp slowly rotted away, turning pink and
green with mould and creating a foul smell.
Kelp flies buzzed around metre-high
mounds of slowly decomposing seaweed, rotting down into something resembling
flayed flesh.
Graveyards of kelp stipes and holdfasts, cut off by kelpers who only
want the fronds, lie where the kelp tracks meet the beach.
Kelp in every stage, from fresh, green, shiny and satin-like
to hard, cracked and black. Every stage of life of kelp was beautiful, every
stage referenced movement in the way it lay.
Bodies of birds strewn in the detritus, looking as though
they had been torn from the sky, unable to defend themselves from the power of
the Roaring Forties winds and vicious rocks. Sharply angled, fiercely pitted
rocks which it was easy to imagine destroying any survivors from the many
shipwrecks in the island’s history. Delicate skeletonised rib-cages remained
attached to fully feathered wings.
Crayfish legs littered the beach at times, as well as the
shells of their heads and tails, easily spotted by the bright orange,
intricately patterned and knobbly surface.
Glass-like Portuguese Man-O-War’s
lay on the sand in echoes of the waves that left them there – strung out like
party festooning left over from a night of celebration. As they hardened in time, they
crackled under-foot.
Wallaby corpses laid marooned along the roads in varying
states of decay, which I learned were: fresh, bloat, active decay,
advanced decay, dry/skeletal. The first few are gruesome and very pungent
under the fierce sun. The last offered a more intriguing, delicate vision of
the life cycle.
The challenge now is to translate all this into a fitting expression of these visceral, primal and timeless tenets.
