Bong Bong Dreaming
Sarah Gray became an artist relatively late in life. She grasped her creativity with both hands and towards the end of her life she had completed a PhD and held many successful exhibitions.
She lived in the Southern Highlands and was inexplicably drawn to the Bong Bong Common - the grassy paddocks downhill from the Briars Hotel. Initially, Sarah was unaware of the deep dark history of the ‘Common’ and it was only through thorough research and much soul searching that she uncovered secrets about our and her colonial past.
Artist Statement about Exhibition:
The cartographic viewpoint used in my own landscape painting is not the perspective used by painters of Western traditional landscapes, but the use of a ‘map-maker’s’ viewpoint – no linear perspective, merely an impression of a flat, or planar, picture plane. The use of a mapping/cartographic perspective was essential in order to gain the desired result. This was achieved by flattening the picture plane and focusing my mind on what the aerial view could be, allowing the mind to drift above the landscape. Although these are landscape paintings, there are no concerns with reviving the conventional European practices of landscape painting as I investigated the creation of spatial effects through the resonance of colours that occurs when they are simultaneously joined or disconnected on the picture plane.
The warmth of the colours I use is suggestive of enclosure, secrecy and seclusion and the mixing of the
Bong Bong Common soil into the paint is a candid rendezvous with material: material as paint and material as a substance from the environment, presenting the painting as maps.
Some of the paintings consist of strong verticals and horizontals with soft passages of paint obscuring and denying the strength of these elements. This veiling use of paint might allude to the denial of the past history of this specific area, the Bong Bong Common at Moss Vale, and what took place there in the early nineteenth century, however, my paintings do not explicitly address this. Rather this history is a starting point for the sort of painterly concerns that I had explored in my earlier dissertations with its primary aim being to create a phenomenological sense of space that is an affective sense of place that directly engages the viewer through his or her sensations.
My mark-making is governed by vertical and horizontal shapes in the landscape, three branches, rocks, crevices and fence lines. This divides the canvas visually and conceptually into figure and ground, creating space for some other kind of content or meaning.