Pole to Post | James Harvey Gallery February 2000 | Artist's Statement
My intention for this show has always been to focus on the landscape, defining specific sites or locations in my surroundings via existing markers in this landscape, in this case poles and posts, viewing them almost as navigational devices. In a general sense it became a process of `mapping' my locality. It was never a deliberate process of `cartography', like most landscape artists I used my surroundings as my starting point and went off on tangents from there. This `mapping' came as a by-product of interpreting my position in the landscape through paintings.
The `Poles and Posts' of the title refers to telegraph poles and to goalposts both of which exist side by side at the only playing field in Stanwell Tops, where I live. Surrounded by bush this perfectly level playing field creates an edge between bush and manicured lawn, delineated by goal posts and wires draped from telegraph poles. Bush meets suburbia meets sport meets telecommunication. During this `pole' painting period the local electricity commission replaced a telegraph pole outside our house, leaving behind a perfectly seasoned telegraph pole. The pole was duly divided up between several neighbours and supplied us with wood-burning fuel for the winter. The idea of the pole as an icon took on a whole new meaning.
The irony is that the original use of the pole as a carrier for telegraphic messages has come back to haunt it, as telecommunication carriers drape cables from poles to homes to connect them to today's version of the telegraphic service.1 Even the historic debate over "telegraphic wires" returns as poles and their wires are condemned as eyesores.
The religious overtones of the telegraph pole are sometimes played on for example in "Pole Repairs- Wombarra" a `ready-made' deposition minus the Christ figure. Along the way there are references to Zurbaran's "St Francis"2 a painter with links to my Spanish heritage.
The dual-purpose goalposts became a focus for me during the 'Pauline Hanson' debate. They became an unintended yet positive metaphor for the advances of multiculturalism in Australia. As a sporting device, which combines the goalposts for both soccer (International), and rugby league (Australian), they exist as a perfect symbol of engineering unifying cultures as a result of an accident.
The Roadside series reflects on the many hours spent driving the local roads, navigating by distinctive poles and markers. They also deal again with the notion of the `edge', from park edge to road's edge. Perhaps this notion of the edge is born out of living physically on the edge, i.e. Stanwell Tops is perched on the Illawarra escarpment, and also on the edge of two cities, between Sydney and Wollongong.
Fred Williams once mentioned in passing that the most perfect landscape (painting) was a map. Perhaps all landscape painters are cartographers at heart.
1. See Michael Cathcart's "How the World Was Wired" SMH 23.10.99, for an investigation of the original Internet, the introduction of the "telegraphic" service in the mid 1800's.
2. Spanish 17th C. painter who completed a major commission for a Carthusian Monastery in my parents home town Jerez de la Frontera, Spain.