Rhizomorphosis:The Morphology of Mangroves
University of the Sunshine Coast Gallery, 2004

Venues
University of the Sunshine Coast Gallery, Queensland (April 1 - May 1 2004)
Project Contemporary Artspace, Wollongong (Oct 21 - 31, 2004)

Artist's Statement

In Jean Cocteau’s film The Blood of a Poet, Orpheus dives into the underworld through a doorway that turns into a watery mirror the instant his body commits to the passage. The artist’s fall opens up a world of insights that lie outside the mobile-net range of language. Like Orpheus, the artist’s promised return with stories to tell and souvenirs to share is what fascinates and draws us into to the gallery space.

Few people venture into the Orphic world of the mangroves. They are not something you pass through on the way to somewhere else. Mangroves demand a quantum leap of entrance, of being inside. And once you have left the familiar solid shore, you must give yourself up to the laws of mud, and mirrored waters. Ghostly white figures of mangrove trees, finger roots and eye socket holes stand prop-like on an estuarine stage. Here imagination follows matter. All life is interconnected, hyper-adaptive and flexible. Temporal and spatial references must be renegotiated. Stillness and patience force an attentive silence and a breathing that is long, slow and deep – in tune with the pulse of the river. The reward is a gradual introduction to the mangroves as a sympathetic organism – a body with much more going on beneath the surface expanses of dumb mud, reflective pools and unruly trees.

Growing up in this littoral world of pandanus palms, saltwater tidal flows and mud flats, I developed a kind of intimacy inside the mangroves. My childhood was spent fishing, swimming and playing inside this lateral rhizomatic world of pneumatophores, serpentine roots, and aquatic lunar rhythms. These early experiential images made up the important first burn to my psychic memory banks. Regular return visits to the same childhood haunts have over the last thirty years served to rewrite and update my mangrove homepage.

Mangroves can be read as dramatic sites of creation and renewal, decay and death. Aesthetically, Tea-tree sepia-waters mix at low tide with burnt umber mud crab browns. Casuarina dark greens are washed by verdant greens of young shoots and dashes of Soldier Crab mauve. Vermilion mouthparts and ochre yellow play against Tango orange sunsets. All this is deep etched (toasted) over the pulsing tinnitus samplings of millions of cicadas that are so loud they rewire the synaptic nerves in your brain. Increasingly showing signs of stress under the weight of urban and industrial development, mangroves are only now being seen as our ecological vital organs that filter, cleanse and give birth to marine life. These sublime, mysterious and uncanny zones also play an integral cultural role as seamless joins between place and identity and serve as metaphors and models for our post-modern heterotopic society.

In the wall-mounted sculpture Site 85: Mangrove Machine, an old oyster lease sign turned jetsam, is recycled as a conceptual road sign indicating the muddy track leading to a riparian underworld. This exhibition can be read as a series of analogue and digital “image maps”; each designed to navigate the border zones between our fluid and creative natures and the more concrete social realities we must return to with Orpheus at our sides.