Wattle Park project...

I've always been much more interested in the process of making art rather than just the finished product. I enjoy the information gathered in the making, in a sense, the evolution of the idea. Last Friday I took myself off to Wattle Park in Burwood and took about a dozen photographs. It was cold, very cold, about 8C degrees whilst I was walking around and my fingers turned instantly arthritic whilst I was holding my camera. It should have been easy, but with the cold weather and the fact that I broke out in hives made this an uneasy excursion. Wattle Park is a beautiful blend of native forest/indigenous remnant bush land and constructed park land with 12,000 Wattle Trees planted. I stitched some of the photographs together to form a kind of vista of a very small part of the view. I've printed out the photographs and am forming an idea in my mind, although at the moment I really don't know where the idea is going, except that it appears to be about temporarily and flow. I'm fascinated by the way in which the camera can fragment and arrest what we perceive as the continuous flow of reality and this stitching together of the images reveals the overlap between one group of trees and the next, but also reveals a gap. In one way I enjoy that the photographs don't quite match up. I equally enjoy the photos that I took of what I consider bodily aspects of fallen branches, such as the following two photos.

I'm rather more inspired by the insectoid or rather broken human form, crouching with its back to us, and the large whitened branch reminiscent of the antlers of some giant stag, than the serene scene in the previous photograph. I'll keep everyone posted about how this project develops.