Reflections on King Island

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.