Artist Statement                          

My history of here

Like most people, I had no idea of what made my childhood distinctive until later. Long-haired hippies, mudbrick houses, nudity and native gardens were all part of normal life for me in Eltham in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It wasn’t until 2007, when I returned for a Nillumbik arts residency with my partner and baby, that I was able to see the idiosyncrasies of my upbringing. 

 The house we inhabited for three months that winter was in a zone of remnant bush and seemed a relic from my childhood.  There in a cavernous mudbrick folly we shivered next to an enormous, though ineffectual, open fireplace. We felt the heat evaporate through glorious oversized ceiling windows, and watched the rain fill the pond that lapped around the glass studio.  More rain fell on the gum leaves that glistened in the weak winter sun, wombats and kangaroos huddled on our veranda some nights and generous dollops of brilliant green moss grew on all the rocks outside. 

 This is nature, we thought bravely, heaping more wood on the fire. Sure it’s rough rural living but it’s real. 

 But, in fact, it wasn’t real at all.  Well not really. The kangaroos and gum trees were real enough but where the bush approached the house it was more or less entirely constructed.  Large basalt boulders piled up the hill above the pond and popped up in pleasing outcrops about the house. These pockmarked basalt rocks, covered in lichen and moss, nestled into the landscape for all the world like they had been there forever.  Basalt is the key word here though.  Basalt comes from volcanos and there were never volcanos near Eltham.

 But, I thought, there were basalt boulders in the garden I grew up in and there were basalt rocks in most of the gardens I could recall.

 As it happened, the house we were staying in that winter was built by Gordon Ford – a renowned landscape designer, active from the late 1950s until the 1990s.  With Peter Glass, and later Sam Cox, he designed perhaps 2000 gardens in his lifetime, from Brighton to Bairnsdale, Malvern to Mildura. Most of all, these native gardens were favoured by people who lived in Alistair Knox mudbrick houses: my parents, for instance, and many of our friends and neighbours.

 Rock placement was Gordon Ford’s specialty and stories abound about his deft use of a crowbar (only) to move these enormously heavy objects into the most natural looking positions. He continued his hard manual labour into the 1990s when, as an octogenarian, his concession was to take naps amongst the rocks to recover from the heavy work.

 The way Ford placed rocks was inspired by his observation of massing banks of clouds. To create these forms he preferred to use the round, weathered surfaces of basalt rather than the jagged local Eltham mudstone. As a consequence he trucked in thousands of rocks from the volcanic plains to the north and west of Melbourne in order to create ‘natural’ native gardens in the east.

 Since that residency in 2007 I have been making paintings of isolated rocks, to emphasize their displacement from the natural environment. Many of the paintings take single and grouped rocks out of Ford’s gardens as if they were sculptures – or even embodiments of an individual personality. Other works combine macramé and landscape design, making connections to craft practices fashionable during the height of Ford’s influence in Eltham. And some paintings are not from Gordon Ford’s gardens at all but are of rocks from around Eltham and other parts of the world that I think he would have liked.

 While much has been written about the way that artistic and cultural values inform gardening as a way of taming nature, I believe there is more to unearth about the way this was developed around Eltham. The native garden aesthetic is in some ways even more paradoxical than formal gardening because so much human intervention needs to be concealed.