Working as an Environmental Artist eventuated for myself as described in the following story. As a family unit, we used to go to our childhood holiday home in a very remote part of South Eastern Australia, which is on the border of New South Wales and Victoria. It was here that my father took us on long walks along four-wheel drive only tracks, to visit untouched beaches, which always filled me with awe. Many years later, I was to visit these beaches with my wife, and collect copious amounts of driftwood, washed up plastics, buoys, ropes and other variables.
It was during the years at art school in Australia, at the end of the seventies that I first began collecting driftwood to make into furniture; and it was this experience that 20 years later I remembered and returned to the very same coastline to collect driftwood once again.
I believe it was the resulting influence of having a serious fire in my Melbourne studio in my early years as an artist, which created the conditions for me to find the flexibility to respond to life in a positive way with my creativity, rather than to remain locked into tried and true ways of making art. The fire completely destroyed my studio and seven years of work within it, including paintings, drawings and prints. It was a devastating time for me, forcing me to turn my attention inward. This incident of the fire, which had deeply impacted both my personal and professional life, had enabled me to mature overall as a person. Artistically, I acquired the ability to face truths about my work, making radical, necessary changes.
The culmination of this maturation and epiphanies around my work in the form of dramatic re-assessments in my aesthetic vision, eventually at a later time sent me looking for driftwood on a shoreline in Victoria, which then directed me to this exciting new medium of found objects.
It is not necessary for all artists to have to experience such a dramatic incident as having a fire in a studio to bring about a major change in their outlook on life. Some artists instinctively do this simply in the process of their work in the studio. This is just how it happened for me and it left an indelible imprint, which has continued to this day.
I imagine the intensity of such an experience for me really woke me up to my priorities. I had only up until that point given scant regard to my inner self. Any depth in my work was largely accidental because in those early days, I was like any young person fresh out of school or university hell-bent on experimenting with whatever was in fashion and partying hard, and I was just largely being unaware. So the time had come for me to take stock.
I’ve never really stopped taking stock, I’m constantly to this day working on myself, to the point of doing many personal growth workshops and trainings over the years, which has helped me to keep checking in with myself to see how I have developed as a human being. I’m constantly asking myself how can I leave this planet a little better than I found it. I never had this attitude when I was younger and I will be forever grateful that I had, through this fire such a strong wake-up call. It has led me to become a flexible individual, open to changes and able to respond to the processes that are going on around me and with in my work.
It’s this very flexibility that had me suggesting to my wife when we moved into our new home in Byron Bay, that I would like to make driftwood furniture for it, simply because it had whitewashed walls and ceilings and I thought the driftwood would complement the interior of the house very well. We were also very poor and this was a cheap and effective way of furnishing our house with a beautiful design.
Stumbling across copious amounts of plastics on the beaches where we went to collect driftwood was a way of existence pointing to me a possible new career direction, if I was to be flexible enough to respond to what was being presented to me. What was on offer to me were literally tons of plastics which had washed up next to the driftwood, that I so keenly had my eye on and instead of my discarding these plastics as been irrelevant, some inner voice was telling me that I could be creative with all of this stuff.
This was the real moment of birth for me as an environmental artist. It has led me to a deep sense of care and concern for our environment which is underpinned by an excitement of the creative possibilities of working with recycled materials and has had me over the years, offering to the viewing public original and unique works from my studio.
My creative medium then shifted from abstract painting to working as an environmental artist, as a result of this ‘artistic accident’ during this time. By collecting driftwood on a remote Victorian coastline, with the intention of making furniture and stumbling upon vast amounts of plastic ocean debris that were washing up on the shoreline, I felt compelled to collect it. With my initial collection I had amassed 80 jumbo garbage bags full of found plastics, all of which I had intended to take to the recycling section of the local tip. The more items I collected however, the more intrigued I grew about their form, their colour and I began to absorb the degree to which these plastics had become a scourge to our environment.
The objects I collected were of many different varieties. Some were ropes and string, very colourful and obviously from boats or ships; some were Styrofoam rounded off by the rocks or by being swept along by the ocean and bleached by the sun; some were plastic drinking bottles. There were of course, myriads of plastics that were chipped and broken. Sometimes these found objects were unrecognizable as the consumer items they once were. There were also buoys and thongs (flip-flops) in dozens of colours. The objects cast from the sea and deposited to the shore were endless in amount, shape, colour and content.
This medium, it occurred to me, could supply an endless array of possibilities. After shipping all the materials back to my studio, I slowly spread the items along the floor, where a giant painter’s palette began to assemble. I began to make art out of the gathered plastics after I had finished making the complete household of driftwood furniture, which took approximately 6 months. It was during the construction of the furniture that I had time to dwell on the possibilities of working also with plastic rubbish.
In an uncanny way these plastics, as they were sorted and arranged in my studio, took on an unspeakable, indefinable and quite magical beauty. Exposed on the floor, they continued to fascinate me. At first, coming from the discipline of having been a painter for so many years, I envisioned my first series as wall works, plastics behind Perspex in shallow boxes, which looked remarkably similar to oil paintings when seen from a distance.
From those early days of making these wall based assemblages, the whole process orientation took shape which was to guide me through many twists and turns in my creativity, which had me exploring many mediums in the found object genre including sculpture, installation, public art, digital printing and a return to painting.
