Wonders in the Woods 2010–

While making the images in the Foundation Photographs gallery, I worked in the area where I lived, in the Aldgate Valley in the Adelaide Hills in South Australia. During that time, I gained enough self-confidence to play with and to extend my personal visual interests. With Wonders in the Woods, my imagination became a stronger element in my working process. At the same time, I also changed from working in the field to working in the studio.

Living a country-life, and constantly dealing with fallen trees, branches, and gathering firewood for winter, I began to see certain pieces of wood as found sculptures. Some suggested the human figure and occasionally I would find human-like heads, faces, or animal figures. Certain pieces of wood suggested new meanings and ideas through my poetic projections onto them.

Seeing a portion of the human torso in a forked tree-branch is a type of anthropomorphism. The question that persisted for me was 'why'. Why does a forked branch, 'legs down’, become a sign for the human figure?

In evolutionary terms, I imagined that the animal brain must have become structured to discern oddities in the landscape. To see an animal or the shape of an enemy in the bushes or amongst the trees was essential for survival. I came to the belief that those structures remain in our brains and affect how our brains interpret our vision. Our use of language is also revealing; we refer to the trunk of our body and to our arms and legs as limbs. 

We think of the generations of our family as our Family Tree; I came to accept that humans have an ‘deep rooted’ connection with trees. The continual forking of a tree's branches is an example of exponential growth (1,2,4,8,16,32,64...). This is the way cells divide and the way our 'Family Trees' grow. I am one person, but it took 2 people to create me, and 4 people to create my parents, and 8 people to create my parent’s parents and so on (see On My Father's Drawing Board, Relatives 1, 2017).

As I delved into these thoughts, I felt I was gaining a glimpse of the way our ancestors, and First Nation people today, see themselves as being connected with the earth and things in nature in a non-dualistic way. 

I imagined early human children playing with forked branches that they may have embellished to make their own human representations. I also imagined shamans using certain parts of trees that suggested male or female attributes as fertility or fetish objects in ceremonies to influence future events.

Bugs and borers that live under the bark of trees, create drawings carved into the wood that, in some cases, appear to be like calligraphy. 

Objects and events that I observed in nature became the core source of my ideas and intuitions. This is the ground that the images in this gallery grew from.