Past work and its history

Title:

2008 BROOME

Location:

Monsoon Gallery Broome WA

Date:

2008/07/10

Description:

** PLEASE SEE BELOW FOR IMAGES

Opening Introduction speech given by Helen Norton at the opening on Thursday 10th July

I left Broome for other adventures abroad and interstate 8 years ago. Prior to this I spent 13 years in Broome developing my ‘vocation’ as an artist amongst other things on top of an already colorful early life in the outback doing everything I could with about the same level of passion as I apply to a painting now.

This week, as an artist, I am sitting on the boardwalk at the Cable beach club doing my ‘long overdue service to the public curiosity’ as the ‘artiste in residence’ being nurtured and fussed over by the magnificent and tireless Sue Tom.

Many people are asking me similar questions. Something like:-

‘What inspires you and what do you paint about, how do you get an image'?

My answer is that I am inspired by the observation of metaphor and memory in everything and I like thinking about thinking and trying to solve this problem of my attraction to thinking and why we remember what we do.

Someone said – 'What if you were not able to paint, never allowed to do it again', and I replied, I would then write. Then 'What if you were not able to write'? And I said I would ask to be shown the way to the kitchen. 'And if we had no stove'? Well I would then ask for the billy and the camp oven. And so it goes.

The point is that creativity is just a way of life, an attitude you can choose to use, an approach that brings a constant feeling of fertility and passion in your life, be you a painter, a waitress or a truckie.

For instance – let me pick on a town icon in the making. There is something about the METAPHOR of Bill Reid the man who will
-    still drill and strand a pearl if need be,
-    cut you a deal if you so wish at closing time,
-    who could possibly afford a most prim home in an exclusive city, but chooses to stay put in this odd town of suspicious origins;
-     to take a shower under the stars in his bush house and to eat his fish and rice with a possum, a mopoke, a few friends and a good glass of red, surrounded by magenta bougainvillea, mauve and white immortal vincas, and the skyline vista of the fuel tanks on the Port.
Now that’s - a piece of Broome, and a piece of the creative in action, something you need to keep in your history.

Something about all that, and something about the wide dry pindan verges with balding bits of foliage and prickles that you cannot turn into Dalkeith lawns;
- something that defies the notions of ‘development’ and inflation, which refuses to leave the verges of old Broome.

I remember when I left here, in 2000, there was talk, - talk that Broome would be like the Gold Coast in 10 years. Well I’m back this week, and the verges are still prickly and dry, a few roads have changed, McDonalds are here, they are still working on the same roundabout at the Boulevard as when I left, and thank god, Bills still feeding the possum.

I think most people here would say despite a bit of suburban sprawl, the Gold Coast is a way off yet. BESIDES - You will have to get Air Mail before that happens!

Sadly Alistair McAlpine, a key contemporary cultural contributor to this town knew only too well how quickly the dry savannah reclaims the ideals of lush tropical resorts and wildlife parks in this country but what remains from what I can see in my short visit are the bones of your forming history.

Commit them carefully to memory and don’t forget your current and forming human stories as you brace and flex for the changes that are coming. It’s the day to day legends, the things you see as ordinary that make art.

If you don’t step back every now and again to get a perspective on what we remember about a town and an experience in our past there will be nothing but ‘the gold coast’ in the coming times. If you loose your memory, you loose your country.

The legend might be a human personality a flower that survives in red porous pindan but always the best legends and metaphors are those that surrender and adapt just a little bit to the will of the country, not mans will. It seems as if it’s the relationship between that man or woman and that country that becomes our stories.

That country is the long dry and the sudden and short drenchings of the wet, and your response to that which forms the juice of your history. That’s what I make art out of.

Thank you to Helen, Simon and staff at Monsoon, to Bill, and to John my brother for his singing tonight and welcome to the exhibition.

Exhibition Overview

The works from 'North-West Hologram' to be shown in Broome in July 2008 - grasp at threads of the eclectic life of the North West of Australia - a series of possible experiences and encounters, and tosses them onto the canvas in a vibrant and energetic game of composing through stripping time and order from recollection. Perhaps this is just what the artist always does in any artistic rendition; however the artist has chosen to make the process more conscious to herself in this body of work

“Layers of meaning are built up in the human imagination over time and with the help of various subjective records kept by the observers, analyzers, dreamers, complainers, artists, writers and philosophers that we are and combined with bits of selective factual data - an image is formed.

All these gatherings are based on historical events and subjective reflections using our perspective and attitudes towards those events in the past. The result is that often history is an overly edited residual fiction based mostly upon particular 'numinous' events that have for some reason or another left a particular echo or footprint upon our memories about time and place.

This seems a logical statement but what is worth pondering is that certain elements of this collection of echoes from the past hang in the air longer and more certainly than others. Memories stick to attitudes. Attitudes are shaped by the collection of our nature as well as our cultural training and our natures response to that. What a complex material our memory ends up being. What drops off in the cutting or editing room of time and what lingers and forms cultural prisons and inspirations for us about any history – personal or collective?
What are these pieces of narrative we cling to, and how do they hang around in places, as scents of experience as tasted through our senses and stored in our memories?

Passing by – hands out, beaks agape, feet planted, plants paw side up to the sun; the patterns that form and cluster into what we call the symbolic, chase nature as if an ordering of an aftershocks chaos - giving us comfort through reasoning.

Nature is the symbolic; nature is chaotically ordered; nature is order.

Mans mind nestles comfortably into the symbolic and so he falls naturally and eternally before the image of the Overman he projects upon nature. How he experiences this inevitable ‘fall’ depends upon his attitude and this will affect the entirety of his life’s experiences leading to how he remembers his time on earth, and as a result, how he wakes each morning and affects every other man, woman and child’s time on earth”.

Helen Norton June 2008