Eidetic Bush | Hobart

Eidetic Bush

March 28 - April 16, 2003 | video-sound installation | Plimsoll Gallery, Hobart

Conceived for Alcorso Foundation Artist in Residence 

Curated by Noel Frankham

The impact of the nation-wide bush fires in Australia over the 2002/03 summer had a great effect on me inspiring the multi-media project Eidetic Bush. This work incorporates digital enhanced video projections developed from performative acts in burnt bush environments and Luigi Nono musical score Caminantes…Ayacucho. Eidetic Bush explores the mystery and dynamism of the human creative impulse.

By peformance and video installation, Eidetic Bush seeks to express a spiritual link between contemporary artistic ideals with the motivating forces behind the creativity of early man. The fire has transformed the colours of the bush into a monochromatic variation of grey shades and has sublimated any living form by creating an aesthetic condition typified by a primordial silence.

In this dramatically suspended atmosphere, the silence of the newly burnt bush is charged with visionary tension; the eidetic ability, that elevates the mind’s eye to co-equality with visual sensation, dissolving the boundaries between imagination and perception, myth and reality is stimulated. The artist’s intervention acquires a “shamanic”, sacredness-bestowing meaning, which can reactivate the contact with vision and “dream up” new myths and new rituals.

E.B. has been developed in two stages: the first one is performative acts carried out in some burnt bush areas where I created spirals on the tree trunks either with strips of clay or by carving marks into the charred bark. The spirals are created as elementary gestures; a creative and cathartic act of deep empathy with the ‘spaceless’, timeless dimension of the burnt bush. It might be the ritual expression of ancient peoples, all traces of whom have been lost/destroyed.

Shapes of essential plasticity, such as a spiral wrapping itself around a charred tree, express a bond between reduction and regression, between basic forms and the ‘ur-forms’ of the mind. In the second stage of creating E.B., the digital images of the landscape where the ‘installation ritual’ took place were enhanced, using 3D software, to make virtual spirals. In this way the ‘actual’ and ‘virtual’ appear as a mutual interaction of two expressive means – the simple human act and digital manipulation – of similar value, but of different aspect and nature.

The images thus produced are projected on two screens for the visitor to experience as a vision of the landscape in perspective. Spirals appear and disappear on the trees with pulsating semi-transparently as they follow the rhythm of Luigi Nono’s musical score, Caminantes…Ayacucho. Whenever the digital spirals appear in full it is impossible to distinguish them from those physically created in the bush.

E.B. is the outcome of complex creative dynamics which utilize otherwise antithetic expressive means and cause them to interact in order to represent how normal boundaries between the products of the mind and the evidence of the senses can be broken down.

Il progetto Eidetic Bush è stato ispirato da una serie impressionante di incendi di foreste Australiane nell’estate del 2003. L’artista con una serie di azioni performative in alcuni boschi incendiati crea delle spirali sugli alberi carbonizzati modellando della creta bianca o incidendone la corteccia carbonizzata. Successivamente le immagini fotografiche del paesaggio dove ha avuto luogo il  “rito performativo” della creazione delle spirali vengono elaborate digitalmente e arricchite di altre spirali, cloni virtuali di quelle reali e indistinguibili da queste. Si ottiene così un video che retroproiettato su due grandi schermi fa sentire il visitatore dell’installazione nel mezzo della foresta incendiata.

Le spirali virtuali, accanto a quelle reali, appaiono e scompaiono sugli alberi e sembrano pulsare al ritmo della colonna sonora dell’installazione, la composizione musicale di Luigi Nono Caminantes…Ayacucho. Eidetic Bush è il risultato di una complessa dinamica creativa che utilizza mezzi espressivi antiteci – il semplice atto umano e la manipolazione digitale – e li fa interagire realizzando un’opera che tende a ripristinare la dimensione entro la quale il sacro e la natura sono tutt’uno con la vita, dove ogni atto diventa rito, dove la sacralità è data dalla fusione dell’immaginario umano legato alla natura con l’istinto, dove il legame originario, primordiale che rende l’uomo parte della terra è sacro. 

Eidetic Bush sottolinea il bisogno dell’uomo contemporaneo di riscoprire una dimensione ancestrale attraverso un’opera di “primitivizzazione” la cui funzione come scrive Kirk Varnedoe è “necessariamente antagonistica, di urto contro le tendenze conformiste e repressive della società occidentale allo scopo di riportare in vita l’energia anarchica dell’uomo primordiale