Mount Waverley Journal
from an artist's book by Dominique Dunstan, 2011
[Dogs]
There are quite a lot of dog tracks preserved in repaired stretches of footpath. You can clearly see where a dog has trotted across the wet concrete. It reminds me of growing up in Preston. There were plenty of unaccompanied hounds roaming the streets when I was a kid. Our dogs got out all the time. Sometimes we'd even let them out so they could go for a run on their own!
You never see that now - wandering mongrels. In fact you rarely see mongrels at all. They are becoming extinct. Only their footprints remain - like modern fossils.
...
[Yellow Tailed Black Cockatoos]
I went for a walk the other day and there is a creek nearby that has been turned back into native bushland. It was freezing and wet. There was no one around. Suddenly there was a ruckus above me. A gang of black cockatoos settled briefly in the treetops overhead. They were big, strong, heavy birds - noisy, with gorgeous feathers. It was a real moment of wonder and I thought about Europeans coming here all those years ago. To suddenly see a flock of massive, wild parrots seems just as extraordinary now as it must have then, only now the parrots are the visitors.
...
[Wattlebirds]
I was standing on the back step this morning* and a pair of wattlebirds flew down and alighted on the power line going to the studio. The first one squawked at the second and a little puff of steamy breath was visible against the dark foliage behind. It was cold but what surprised me was suddenly realizing the bird was warm, and breathing out as it sang. I don't know why this surprised me, it's pretty obvious really, but it was lovely
...and a moment later they were gone.
(*Saturday)
from an artist's book by Dominique Dunstan, 2011
[Dogs]
There are quite a lot of dog tracks preserved in repaired stretches of footpath. You can clearly see where a dog has trotted across the wet concrete. It reminds me of growing up in Preston. There were plenty of unaccompanied hounds roaming the streets when I was a kid. Our dogs got out all the time. Sometimes we'd even let them out so they could go for a run on their own!
You never see that now - wandering mongrels. In fact you rarely see mongrels at all. They are becoming extinct. Only their footprints remain - like modern fossils.
...
[Yellow Tailed Black Cockatoos]
I went for a walk the other day and there is a creek nearby that has been turned back into native bushland. It was freezing and wet. There was no one around. Suddenly there was a ruckus above me. A gang of black cockatoos settled briefly in the treetops overhead. They were big, strong, heavy birds - noisy, with gorgeous feathers. It was a real moment of wonder and I thought about Europeans coming here all those years ago. To suddenly see a flock of massive, wild parrots seems just as extraordinary now as it must have then, only now the parrots are the visitors.
...
[Wattlebirds]
I was standing on the back step this morning* and a pair of wattlebirds flew down and alighted on the power line going to the studio. The first one squawked at the second and a little puff of steamy breath was visible against the dark foliage behind. It was cold but what surprised me was suddenly realizing the bird was warm, and breathing out as it sang. I don't know why this surprised me, it's pretty obvious really, but it was lovely
...and a moment later they were gone.
(*Saturday)
field study - a rationale
by Dominique Dunstan, 2008
“Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system.”[1]
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Artists have always responded to the natural world. Even a cursory survey of our culture reveals a rich tradition of landscape painting, botanical drawing, wildlife and wilderness photography and nature documentaries. As our population grows and society concentrates into bigger and bigger urban centres, our love and longing for the “natural world” may not diminish but our opportunities to engage directly with it, do. Perhaps this loss of sensation provokes an appetite for visual art of increasing intensity - more beauty, more wonder, more spectacle. Art can serve a valuable role as an archive of the natural world but there is a danger of becoming seduced by this virtual ark and unwittingly trading the substance for the shadow. (I recently caught myself musing on how much better The Life of Mammals would look on a big LCD television). The job of representing nature has become problematic. I am sceptical of the ability of more beauty or more terror to adequately address that fundamental loss of sensation, of experiences and ultimately, nature itself.
As an artist and a citizen I feel a responsibility to find ways to represent my landscape and environment that restore connection, engagement and awareness. The earth is not somewhere else. It is under my feet. To preserve the immediacy of this interaction I conduct this study of art and nature where I live, so my content is drawn from the urban/suburban environment I inhabit from day to day. I have looked to artists who have scrutinized perception and looking, and locate their gaze within their world, not outside it. Claude Monet, Olafur Eliasson, Gabriel Orozco. These artists are sensitive to the ephemeral, and the play of chance and order in their physical surroundings.
I have used photography as a visual reference tool and document for my work for many years. More recently it has become my primary medium. This process has been gradual and seamless and yet photography still supports these functions and more – information, communication, work, leisure, personal history and memories. This multivalent, blended quality makes it the ideal medium for a project that explores change, transitions and multiple points of view, both literally and figuratively. It is a medium that can capture poetry as readily as objectivity.
The photograph, like its content, the artist and the viewer, is part of the world and even in the digital age must find some concrete form in space to be experienced. The form and context of the photograph form a significant part of its meaning. I have explored various ways of presenting the work that acknowledge the photograph’s physical, spatial and virtual qualities. I have also experimented with the viewer’s shifting place in the space they share with the work. I hope the viewer will be intrigued and be moved to discover different points of view and an active engaged way of looking. I hope the work inspires a connection with the organic world, and consideration of the flaws, frailty and beauty of both the living world and the creative process.
[1] Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of perception, 2004 p. 235
CIRCLE * PHASE * LOOP
by Dominique Dunstan and Ko Sonnoy, 2009
The cyclical nature of life.
The exhibition explores the circular nature of some fundamental human experiences – growth, struggle and harmony, the passing of time. The leitmotif of these explorations is the circle. This motif, or device, is used to describe time, space and experience. It resonates through the diverse media presented (painting, photography, video) finding expression in the painterly trace of gestures, the self as the axis of a mobile visual field, and the use of the body in performance. Organic processes of permutation and recombination inform an ongoing and recurring experience of physical and psychological space.
Concerned with the cyclical, or circular nature of essential elements of life (such as growth, time and energy) these works manifest universal themes and manifold perspectives.
Judy Jones and Dominique Dunstan draw their subject matter from their local environment. Inspired by the arid bushland surrounding her home in Castlemaine, Judy creates gestural canvasses with a palette referencing her local landscape. These gestures record touch and duration while describing a circular motif that is both figure and void within the picture plane. The circle is lost and found over and over in a process of action, design and rupture.
Dominique uses photography to document marginal or commonplace examples of the natural world that coexist with the urban environment – the sky over her backyard, a grassy field between the freeway and the river. In Heavens she uses a mirrored, elliptical structure to contain a composite view that expands into infinity using total internal reflection. Loy’s Paddock documents the cycle of growth and decay by observing toadstools on her way to work. Both artists discover the universal in the everyday.
Ko Sonnoy deals with a different kind of environment, the terrain of mind and emotion. Working with performance video, she wrestles with an implacable object in an imaginary space. The action, restricted by tight framing, is offset by the translucent depth of superimposed layers. The task is charged with physical and mental energy that ebbs and flows in endless cycles of repeated action. The circle is invoked, distorted and restored in many ways by the three artists - temporally, using duration, ellipsis and recollection, and formally using design, perspective and space.
Time is revealed in differing ways through each work and in the experience of the exhibition as a whole. Ko uses the inherently temporal medium of video and dissolves its linear nature with layers and looping to reveal circular psychological patterns. Dominique works with the instantaneous moment of the snapshot. She multiplies it over months of observation to create an expanded field of earth and sky and records the transition of experience to memory within the repetition of her daily routine. Judy translates an immersive knowledge of her environment into the rhythm and flow of paint on a tonal field. She captures fleeting, spiralling gestures with a brush, that are answered by the fluid travel of the paint as it runs and dries over time.
While their concerns are diverse in the examination of geographic, visual or psychological space, the thematics of circularity are shared and the artists’ approaches reveal further common ground. Concepts of the body are incorporated in the works, using perception, gesture and human movement. Fragmented, repetitive or gestural imagery evokes notions of emptiness, wholeness or containment which may give rise to shifts in viewer ‘perspective’ encouraging intellectual and psychological movement. The viewer’s body is actively engaged and guided around the exhibition - shifts in scale, placement and lighting encouraging movement into or away from the works. Like a game of rochambeau, the gallery, the work and the viewer interact in a shifting, continuous play of movement, sensation and ideas.
Arcadia
artist's statement
by Dominique Dunstan, 2006
Arcadia: lost creatures and inner journeys reflects on our inner nature and the natural world, the tension between the physical and the spiritual.
Arcadia is both an illusion and a reality. It is a world we search for in our imagination, inspired by the one we live in and the one we have lost. Despite the classical inspiration for the work the issues these artists explore are relevant and even urgent. The pursuit of happiness is a basic human right but our careless pursuit of pleasure and comfort is rapidly destroying the natural environment we all revere. Climate change and species loss are just a few of the many daunting challenges we face.
Many cultures have the notion of an afterlife, or another world, where the thoughts and actions of this life affect what happens in the next. Perhaps we will find eternal happiness and perfection. Perhaps we are destined to relive the same life over and over, endlessly repeating our mistakes. How do our inner journeys shape the landscape that we live in? Can we escape our flaws and frailties or do we drag them with us into paradise? Does heaven need to exist for us to imagine it?
Maybe we are already there.
by Dominique Dunstan, 2008
“Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system.”[1]
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Artists have always responded to the natural world. Even a cursory survey of our culture reveals a rich tradition of landscape painting, botanical drawing, wildlife and wilderness photography and nature documentaries. As our population grows and society concentrates into bigger and bigger urban centres, our love and longing for the “natural world” may not diminish but our opportunities to engage directly with it, do. Perhaps this loss of sensation provokes an appetite for visual art of increasing intensity - more beauty, more wonder, more spectacle. Art can serve a valuable role as an archive of the natural world but there is a danger of becoming seduced by this virtual ark and unwittingly trading the substance for the shadow. (I recently caught myself musing on how much better The Life of Mammals would look on a big LCD television). The job of representing nature has become problematic. I am sceptical of the ability of more beauty or more terror to adequately address that fundamental loss of sensation, of experiences and ultimately, nature itself.
As an artist and a citizen I feel a responsibility to find ways to represent my landscape and environment that restore connection, engagement and awareness. The earth is not somewhere else. It is under my feet. To preserve the immediacy of this interaction I conduct this study of art and nature where I live, so my content is drawn from the urban/suburban environment I inhabit from day to day. I have looked to artists who have scrutinized perception and looking, and locate their gaze within their world, not outside it. Claude Monet, Olafur Eliasson, Gabriel Orozco. These artists are sensitive to the ephemeral, and the play of chance and order in their physical surroundings.
I have used photography as a visual reference tool and document for my work for many years. More recently it has become my primary medium. This process has been gradual and seamless and yet photography still supports these functions and more – information, communication, work, leisure, personal history and memories. This multivalent, blended quality makes it the ideal medium for a project that explores change, transitions and multiple points of view, both literally and figuratively. It is a medium that can capture poetry as readily as objectivity.
The photograph, like its content, the artist and the viewer, is part of the world and even in the digital age must find some concrete form in space to be experienced. The form and context of the photograph form a significant part of its meaning. I have explored various ways of presenting the work that acknowledge the photograph’s physical, spatial and virtual qualities. I have also experimented with the viewer’s shifting place in the space they share with the work. I hope the viewer will be intrigued and be moved to discover different points of view and an active engaged way of looking. I hope the work inspires a connection with the organic world, and consideration of the flaws, frailty and beauty of both the living world and the creative process.
[1] Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of perception, 2004 p. 235
CIRCLE * PHASE * LOOP
by Dominique Dunstan and Ko Sonnoy, 2009
The cyclical nature of life.
The exhibition explores the circular nature of some fundamental human experiences – growth, struggle and harmony, the passing of time. The leitmotif of these explorations is the circle. This motif, or device, is used to describe time, space and experience. It resonates through the diverse media presented (painting, photography, video) finding expression in the painterly trace of gestures, the self as the axis of a mobile visual field, and the use of the body in performance. Organic processes of permutation and recombination inform an ongoing and recurring experience of physical and psychological space.
Concerned with the cyclical, or circular nature of essential elements of life (such as growth, time and energy) these works manifest universal themes and manifold perspectives.
Judy Jones and Dominique Dunstan draw their subject matter from their local environment. Inspired by the arid bushland surrounding her home in Castlemaine, Judy creates gestural canvasses with a palette referencing her local landscape. These gestures record touch and duration while describing a circular motif that is both figure and void within the picture plane. The circle is lost and found over and over in a process of action, design and rupture.
Dominique uses photography to document marginal or commonplace examples of the natural world that coexist with the urban environment – the sky over her backyard, a grassy field between the freeway and the river. In Heavens she uses a mirrored, elliptical structure to contain a composite view that expands into infinity using total internal reflection. Loy’s Paddock documents the cycle of growth and decay by observing toadstools on her way to work. Both artists discover the universal in the everyday.
Ko Sonnoy deals with a different kind of environment, the terrain of mind and emotion. Working with performance video, she wrestles with an implacable object in an imaginary space. The action, restricted by tight framing, is offset by the translucent depth of superimposed layers. The task is charged with physical and mental energy that ebbs and flows in endless cycles of repeated action. The circle is invoked, distorted and restored in many ways by the three artists - temporally, using duration, ellipsis and recollection, and formally using design, perspective and space.
Time is revealed in differing ways through each work and in the experience of the exhibition as a whole. Ko uses the inherently temporal medium of video and dissolves its linear nature with layers and looping to reveal circular psychological patterns. Dominique works with the instantaneous moment of the snapshot. She multiplies it over months of observation to create an expanded field of earth and sky and records the transition of experience to memory within the repetition of her daily routine. Judy translates an immersive knowledge of her environment into the rhythm and flow of paint on a tonal field. She captures fleeting, spiralling gestures with a brush, that are answered by the fluid travel of the paint as it runs and dries over time.
While their concerns are diverse in the examination of geographic, visual or psychological space, the thematics of circularity are shared and the artists’ approaches reveal further common ground. Concepts of the body are incorporated in the works, using perception, gesture and human movement. Fragmented, repetitive or gestural imagery evokes notions of emptiness, wholeness or containment which may give rise to shifts in viewer ‘perspective’ encouraging intellectual and psychological movement. The viewer’s body is actively engaged and guided around the exhibition - shifts in scale, placement and lighting encouraging movement into or away from the works. Like a game of rochambeau, the gallery, the work and the viewer interact in a shifting, continuous play of movement, sensation and ideas.
Arcadia
artist's statement
by Dominique Dunstan, 2006
Arcadia: lost creatures and inner journeys reflects on our inner nature and the natural world, the tension between the physical and the spiritual.
Arcadia is both an illusion and a reality. It is a world we search for in our imagination, inspired by the one we live in and the one we have lost. Despite the classical inspiration for the work the issues these artists explore are relevant and even urgent. The pursuit of happiness is a basic human right but our careless pursuit of pleasure and comfort is rapidly destroying the natural environment we all revere. Climate change and species loss are just a few of the many daunting challenges we face.
Many cultures have the notion of an afterlife, or another world, where the thoughts and actions of this life affect what happens in the next. Perhaps we will find eternal happiness and perfection. Perhaps we are destined to relive the same life over and over, endlessly repeating our mistakes. How do our inner journeys shape the landscape that we live in? Can we escape our flaws and frailties or do we drag them with us into paradise? Does heaven need to exist for us to imagine it?
Maybe we are already there.
press release
Troubled in paradise
Arcadia: lost creatures and inner journeys
Melbourne: How do our inner-journeys shape the landscape we live in? Can we escape our flaws and frailties or do we drag them with us into paradise? Does heaven need to exist for us to imagine it?
Arcadia: lost creatures and inner journeys is a joint exhibition by Dominique Dunstan and Aneta Bozic that explores these questions. Running at 69 Smith Street Gallery in Fitzroy, the exhibition will feature paintings, sculpture and drawings inspired by Nicolas Poussin’s enigmatic painting, Et in Arcadia Ego.
Dominique Dunstan and Aneta Bozic both work at the State Library of Victoria. This is their third collaborative exhibition produced at 69 Smith Street Gallery. Although their styles are different, they have built a dialogue over time which unifies the current show and embraces a baroque sensibility of darkness and light; simplicity and ornament.
Aneta Bozic’s drawings describe a sensuous landscape of animal and human bones emerging from velvet shadows. Interested in perception and interconnectedness, Aneta takes hidden, yet familiar elements and transforms them to give new purpose and meaning. Her mixed media drawings and paintings use her trademark palette of black and white with an occasional splash of red.
Dominique Dunstan creates glittering, ethereal sculptures of native plants and animals, using glass, aluminium and salt. She looks for remnants of Eden in museums, parks and her own backyard and employs a surprising combination of everyday and traditional materials.
Arcadia: lost creatures and inner journeys
69 Smith Street Gallery, Fitzroy
18 October to 5 November 2006
Opening: 4-6pm Saturday, 21 October
Gallery hours: Wed-Sat 11am–5pm, Sun 12– 5pm.
Phone: 9347 2713
Website: www.home.vicnet.au/~smith69
Email: smithstreet69@hotmail.com