Location | Artist's Statement
The series has been about looking at landscape and personal place in the landscape and trying to arrive at an alternative more inclusive and personalised description of place. The early works in the series such as ‘Location (drawing)’ started with an almost cartographic approach, attempting to integrate personal stories into the works, creating a type of personal map, an “autobiographical map”.
The mapping and cartographic imagery in the works like the Location prints have become more subtle over time. For example the implied contour lines from a topographic map in the cropped figures. These closely gathered contour lines echo the tight lines on the maps of the Illawarra escarpment area (my previous home). An area approximately 80 miles south of Sydney on the East coast of Australia.
The floral images in the intaglio panels, the Gymea or Illawarra Lily (Doryanthes excelsa) are a symbol of place denoting my previous home, Stanwell Tops, on the Illawarra escarpment.
The Lily is huge native flower of the area and a very prominent feature of the area when in flower.
The linocut panels are details from a series of paintings by Francisco de Zurbarán a Spanish 17th C painter, commissioned for a Carthusian Monastery in my parent’s home town, Jerez de la Frontera, in the far south of Spain. These panels relate the idea of place mixed in with family history. My father worked at the monastery for some time during the 1940’s
The monastery still stands but is empty of the Zurbarán works. The monastery known locally as “La Cartuja” is still a well-known feature and historical focus of my parent’s town .