Dr. Linda Marie Walker, Drawing Moves, Drawing Inland Sea 2008 |
Essay on Drawing Inland Sea and Salt Drawing Lake
Drawing Moves
Dr. Linda Marie Walker, 2008
A calm day, sun shining, a bee, car far off; a film-maker stands on the mudflat, his camera on a tripod, bent over a little, as if in a movie himself, the camera open to the shining pools of water, the low redbrown succulents, the greenbrown grass, the greyblue scrub, and the tyre tracks across the spongy ground. The road is palebrown, the sound of the sea faint. He is taking immense time, the air is warm, I hear his feet move on the tiny shells. In a month or two the water will have evaporated and the stench of the rotting reeds and algae in the summer heat will be overwhelming. In the thick low saltbush tiny birds flutter to and fro. There’s a plane, one minute sun one minute rain, dark light slowly expands; last purple crosses the swamp, thecloudsfalltothehorizon.
Giving to the land, to give without wanting givingness to be evident; without requiring a giving back; the land gives, in its own time, in its own image. To be made, oneself, a figure (inasense), because of answering
a call, an idea; and, a situation is a spatial ‘place’ – in terms of a meaning (virtual) or location (manifest). A space has been opened by a livingbeing for/to whom choosing is possible. The situation is ground; a space has come into view by one’s beingthere, having founded it (as if) resolutely; it was there without you though; by decision you have seen the situation; and, you are walking away; and, then you are walking back; you are very close now, and now you have gone by, left; a space comes about, to work with.
Landscape, in an old dictionary, is ‘a piece of inland scenery’; land is: ground, soil, state, country. One/self is always in the landscape, that’s how one is in/of the world, one is landed in the land. Lame, sometimes, for sure, but sure-footed nevertheless, in a landlocked kind of way. The land is a landing, and we enjoy landing, or arriving – coming into to land. Writing is landing, and art is landing; and land is thought. How do we speak land, and ‘bring’ land expression, outside of and other than itself, when it is not here or there (when it is part of another situation’s idea, e.g. art). It come into our sight (but when), in relation to our use (anapparatusofefficacy) of it, our touch of it, our peeling of it into images (what do we think it is/we are, that we want to make something in its name); in other words, when we remove ourself from its view of us. Art transforms the thing (of our interest), writing transforms the thing (of art’s interest), writing about the transformation of land into image is almost chemical (the turning of something into something else and then into something else again); a begetting, an act within the createdspaceoferos, a participatory space, where one adds memory to memory, in the desire to extend
remembering; this can only be through love and care and intuitive moves, the following of an inner sensation, a quickening, a chance (for begetting to forget, or put aside, ‘plan’ (or recall, turn, go back)). The land should not be represented (as it is not what it seems). The land when encountered, and this is slow, is a mystery, a universe of ‘kinds’, an unwieldy poetic, minute, immense, vibratory,
unfolding, folding place (always in the midst of re-arrangement, of finish and unfinish, of stalling and surging). We see landscape how we learn to see landscape (‘a piece of inland scenery’). Land is un(tran)scriptable; the ambiguity of translation, which is an action, a physical/psychic act, (a mystery that is) more tenuous, more suggestive, more fallable, more sensual (and more affecting). The artoflandwork, if it is ‘work’, if it thinks of itself as ‘work’, wants, in the underworld of intention, to be an objectseen, an appearance to appear before. This ‘work’ is not reasonable, or pragmatic, or didactic; it is work of ‘intricacies’ and marvels. The land, landscape, ‘the world’ is not a picture; land is political, its vulnerability is our vulnerability; our looking at it is its looking at us, we are land(scape).
Something always remains – the imprint of the foot, the scent of the skin, the disturbance of the air. The artist could tend the land, by effort, by thought, bynotbeinganartist – and measuring, planting, dreaming. Land, its value or event(fullness), as landscape, as experience, is its pliancy; oneself is eventful too, a scene, rather than from a scene (as if there is a scene to be ‘from’, and to be taken from, and to be made scenefull; one is a stranger in a strange land, passing through); and one is texture and tempo, and a scenesituation. It’s like breathing, this land – but, and this is the dilemma, the work comes back to the gallery. What if the gallery, or something from the gallery, pictures of it for instance, went out to the land; and the artist and the viewer went out too, and conditioned by the journey see/saw the land – a small gesture, or nothing, or the actual doing of the drawing or the filming, or the writingunwriting of this (over time) could eventually come into the gallery (ten years from now); no ‘landscape’ in the gallery, just the intimation of landthought; the idea that it might exist, that the bones might feel dust, or the mouth taste stones, or the ears hear grass; in effect, no artefacts, only affects (and scraps of memories and hopes); nothing-to-see, except oneself and the other (the performerartistviewer) who says (assoundintime) they have ‘seenlandscape’.
