to the island

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Insta-city

This month involved a brief sojourn in Sydney, where time was spent supping coffees in schmick Surry Hills cafes, eating copious dumplings and exploring the 18th Biennale of Sydney (http://bos18.com/). I walked the city one cold afternoon, taking Instragram photos for Lonely Planet (@lonelyplanet, @littlecollisions). When you're a regular visitor to a city, it's easy to veer towards a jaded and flat encounter, but with camera (or, rather, iphone) firmly in hand, I felt a revived enthusiasm, and set off to discover the city as if for the first time. Emerging from Central Station, the most prosaic of Sydney transit points, I had that famous Proust quote in mind: The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. A wet and wintry city is a ripe setting for architecture, interiors and light. No change to preoccupation, then, in this new voyage.

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Cockatoos and Convicts

Did you know there is an incredible industrial and historic relic of an island sitting plump in Sydney Harbour? Maybe you do if you frequent the Balmain ferry route or have headed there to watch the New Year’s Eve fireworks. Information about the island’s Aboriginal history is scant, but it was known by local indigenous people as Wa-rea-mah, and later Biloela, meaning ‘cockatoo’. The island is an eerie place, scattered with remnants of its various personas as convict penal colony, school for wayward boys and orphans, and government ship yards. You can easily imagine the ghosts of men in chains from almost 200 years ago, toiling to blast the cliff and excavate the dock area. It’s a brutal history that offsets the maritime success achieved through the ships constructed in the island's workshops and launched into the bay.

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Modern artscape

One of the island’s modern incarnations is as a location for the Biennale of Sydney. The juxtaposition of an industrial and historical site housing contemporary art creates a fascinating yet unsettling context for the installations, housed in warehouses, old grain silos and set along pitch-black tunnels through the cliff. Cranes and industrial machinery along the wharf and around the island take on a creative appearance, tall and poetic as sculptures. Looming on long legs, they appear almost humanesque. Functional objects that transform into artistic spectacle and comment. The interplay between historical and modern occupation was acknowledged, intentionally or otherwise, in several exhibitions at the Biennale. It was these works that referenced the layering of historical transformation and the container of the art itself – chiselled tunnels, industrial-sized cogs and winches, giant steel frames and parts I couldn’t name a purpose for – that I found most engaging. Here, too, the journey became one about having new eyes. About reinvention.

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The pieces

Chasm, by Fujiko Nakay, involved an artificial mist periodically ejected in great bursts from the cliffside near the entrance to Building 150, itself once a turbine shop and brass foundry. The mist's eruption against the afternoon sky when viewed from the darkness inside the warehouse created a magical scene of silhouettes as people interacted with the piece. Morphing forms would appear and then disappear without a trace. 

Inside Building 150, against a constant electronic soundscape tumbling and crashing, the beauty and symmetry found in the industrial machinery was poignantly referenced by Cal Lane. Lace designs in red sand, an odd contrast against the concrete flooring, led to a white lattice-work shipping container, resembling a large, elaborate bird cage. 

Jonathan Jones' untitled light installation through Tunnel 1 cut a jagged path through the cliff, created a metaphoric connection to the convict chiselling once done to create this corridor. 

Outside, the weather was suitably tempestuous and unnerving – gloomy clouds threatened, dissipated to blue, reformed, then erupted into showers and downpour before clearing, only to repeat throughout the day. My day at the Biennale involved constant transformations and new perspectives on a fantastic hybrid island beneath shifting skies.

an evening exhibit

Linking time  ---  If you cut through the Carlton Gardens between Rathdowne and Nicholson Streets, and head between the Royal Exhibition Building and Melbourne Museum, you’ll find yourself a small figure in a vast grey plaza, dwarfed by space and scale on both sides. This open space is a physical span that metaphorically links architectural achievement from very different points in history, creating a dialogue between contrasting tastes and modes of design. Walking this line between two grand constructs, you could be tracing the midpoint in a filmic split screen. The 1880 Exhibition Building stands like a regal aunt next to the youthful contemporary edges of the Melbourne Museum. Its dome is modelled ambitiously on Brunelleschi’s Duomo in Florence, and the Italian Renaissance influence cries of the bold European aspirations of early Melbourne.

Facades  ---  I’ve often stared at the Royal Exhibition Building as I rode past on the tram or walked this way. For all its World Heritage–listed status and fame, I’ve found its appearance to be rather one-dimensional, like a stamped piece of plain white cardboard. Great dome aside, there’s something particularly artificial about this building’s facade, as though it were a theatre set propped up from behind. It’s easy to imagine pressing a palm flat to its side and watching it topple to the ground with a sudden clap. It reminds me of the magic garden a friend gave me once for a present, which had a Venetian-style architectural facade erected amid a coloured backdrop on a bed of sprout seeds. A little water each day saw the seeds flourish, and an ensuing alfalfa crop grew a spindly garden around the cardboard building.

A way of seeing  ---  On the night I walked the grey plaza that connects the two buildings, twilight was brightening. It’s a paradox perhaps, but twilight sometimes feels this way as the sky hangs luminous, rather than the darkening that it is. It was solstice, the true start of winter. It was the start of a new season and things appeared to me differently. The Exhibition Building loomed solid and majestic, lit by electric light from within and the falling sun from behind. The light was an embellishment. More than that, it was a fleshing out. As I walked I noticed too that the building was at my feet. Its dome reflected neatly in a puddle in the forecourt. It had been raining solidly for days. Areas of the state had flooded. We’d had an earthquake substantial enough to have me bracing beneath a doorway. In the puddle I saw an alternative dimension revealed at my feet. History had become alive. My breath dispersed into the cold night before the cut-out building that was now transformed, full and substantial. 

walking is in the mind

By day: the contemplation of punctuation

ON a recent day walk, we follow a sign along a steep leaf-strewn path shaded by forest canopy to Camels Hump. Or is that Camel’s Hump? The birds obviously agree with the analysis of a missing apostrophe, having perfectly placed a grammatically correct dropping between the ‘l’ and the ‘s’ on the park sign. My companion argues for ‘hump’ as a verb. We contemplate the likelihood of camels being adjectival. We discuss the correct punctuation of no-nos. And goat’s cheese. Matters of great editorial importance. The forest’s rutted paths and towering autumnal canopy become written to memory through our conversation, forever inscribed with wayward punctuation.

 NAVIGATING a muddy, uphill climb through damp, sunless forest, we labour over Alexander the Great and the conflict between Greece and Macedonia. About which we know little. Our classical and contemporary history gets dredged. We piece our individual understandings together into a ragged quilt, missing a number of stitches. This process of discussion and articulation, the recalling of facts, names and information we thought were lost engages us. The creative knitting together of history and ideas. Conversation is a free-ranging group effort. Gaps and misinformation are tolerated. We’re equals in discovery beneath the spindly gums, amidst the knee-high ferns and grassy scrub. 

THE TERRAIN we cover is beyond the physical path we embark upon; we roam and climb and discover more than we had planned for.

By night: the indulgence of voyeurism

A CITY night. Electric hues. The moon scuffles with skulking, pallid clouds. Silence. And then a car door slams.

A NIGHT walk is a different beast. Like the day walk it satisfies curiosity but indulges too a longing for solitude and a tendency towards voyeurism. A desire to spy the in-between world that night-time reveals. To watch objects shift shape in the shadows, surrealistically bathed in halogen and moonlight, fused into an unlikely harmony of artificial and natural illumination. In the darkness of a suburban street, wandering on our own, we bear witness to other people's domesticity: lamp lights diffuse through net curtains, a blind half-shuttered allows a vertical slatted view of a kitchen scene. There’s the thrum of TVs, stereos, dinnertime conversations, children crying. 

A LAMP-POST droops a sad neck with its lonely light. A picket fence leaps from the shadow in illuminated white paint. Everyday objects transform in the darkness, become enlivened, embellished by the blaze of autumnal moonlight and the eerie glow of suburban street beams. The inanimate becomes personified. There’s also a hint of melancholy. But perhaps that is our own projection.

CONVERSATIONS on the night walk are internal, complex and laced with emotional details that resist words. You find connection in isolation; reflection in stillness.

a theatre of light

IT’s a night like any other. A bar. Some drinks. Many conversations with friends. This bar, however, is not like any other. It has a cinema out the back. We take our drinks and sit there, two of us, in the empty space, with the midnight conversations dulled behind us. The space is functional, utilitarian, but there is a lamp lit in one corner that transforms quotidian objects into luminous, burnished lines that I covet for my camera lens.

I wonder, what moves us to take photographs? Do we hope to seize the past, compose narratives, transform memory into something tangible? Are we trying to make evidence of events, capture the real, hold something up as ‘truth’? In many instances, taking a photograph is all of these things. Tourists in particular are good at this. Evidence. Narrative. Memories.

Beyond holiday snapshots, though, the eye is important. You have to see something first. You sense possibility, respond to, perhaps, the potential in the light, the colour, the composition. The photographer imagines how reality could be, not just how it is.

Some of my favourite things to photograph are everyday objects that have been set apart from the mundane, often by a trick of light. I can crave an image, like a predator who sets sights on its prey, tracks it and then cages it. Yet it’s not a sinister act. Although it is one of ownership. Control. Desire.

Chairs. I photographed the chairs. I found them beautiful. But to my friend they were no doubt quite ordinary. ‘I never would have photographed that’, he said, mystified. But when he saw how they were lit up in the photograph, he too loved what he saw.

In this way, photography is far from being a simple representation of reality. When we select a subject, choose the exposure, angle the camera, zoom in, it is an interpretation of what is real. We are a filter. When we delete an image, reposition the lens and take another shot – one we prefer, for whatever reason – we are imposing ourselves upon the image.

What to me seems certain is that the image takes on a life of its own, beyond the first view with the naked eye, beyond the prosaic reality of being stacked and empty chairs in a theatre. The composition may be identical, but we are left with an image of an image of an image…