Thoughtfactory: Fleurieuscapes

strange appearances

The coast of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula can be quite wild and dangerous especially when the weather is rough or stormy:

When I am walking in those conditions I experience the coastal landscape as dark and strange. Hence my attempts with granite, or rock pools to find a way to represent the dark and the strange without embracing a mystical version of the noumenal world.

This image, for instance, is an attempt to make the coastal landscape along the southern Fleurieu Peninsula dark and strange without going mystical --ie referring to a noumenal world of processes, forms, or ideas that lies behind the phenomenal world that is experienced by us.

The noumenal world can be invoked when trying to explain the phenomenal, by describing the underlying causes of the phenomenal through theoretical reason. Thus theoretical natural science refers to a world of molecules, atoms, electrons, quarks, the curvature of space-time, black holes, the Big Bang, etc. However, this is not the world of objects in space and time (eg.,rocks, sea, seaweed, rock pools etc) that I daily experience with my senses when I am on a poodlewalk.

granite formation, Kings Head

This picture is from the archives. It was made in 2013 at Kings Head, Waitpinga, just below Kings Beach Retreats. We were still living in Adelaide's CBD at the time, and coming down to Encounter Bay every second weekend.

This photo session incorporated a poodlewalk to Kings Head from the car park at Kings Head Rd and back again. This walk is part of the Heysen Trail to Waitpinga Beach in the Newland Heads Conservation Park, and then to the Trail's starting point at Cape Jervis.

I remembered this image when I uploaded this digital version, which was made 5 years latter as a scoping study. The above picture is a 5x4 scanned colour file that has been converted into black and white. So I had already made the 5x4 picture (along with several medium format versions made in the same year) that I was scoping for in January 2018. My memory was that the previous 5x4 attempt hadn't been successful--people said they didn't think much of the image -- so I felt that I needed to have another go. Hence the digital scoping.

a series of small photobooks boxed

Lately, I have been thinking about stepping beyond the boundaries of this Fleurieuscapes blog that doesn't really go anywhere. I have been thinking along the lines of having another solo exhibition, or of producing a photobook. I have enough material, and my thinking has been that the book is primary and the exhibition is secondary, in that the latter could be used to launch the photo book.

Judging from my experience with the previous Fleurieuscapes exhibition, exhibitions with framed prints are expensive, they have a short existence, and they are quickly forgotten. Few are the memories of them. So it doesn't really add up. However, an exhibition could be used as a platform to launch a photo book, thereby making the latter known to the public at the opening. Distribution is the really big problem with photobooks and launching the book at the opening night of the exhibition would help.

If so, then it is really becomes a question of how to organize the material in a photobook. It needs to have an idea to distinquish it from all the other photobooks being produced. The one that I have toyed with in the past a topological thinking is the idea of place--that is, my experiences of being in a place that is the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. In Heideggerian language to be is to be in place. So it is being -at-home-in-a place.

Photography, after all, is a way of collecting experiences, whilst the book is a way of moving photography away from the white walls of the art gallery. In this case a photography of a limited situatedness of existence in a place that is a series of events or processes in an open region .

belonging place

This picture was made on an early autumn morning along Franklin Parade in Encounter Bay, Victor Harbor. Franklin Parade runs close to the beach, and it is where the old beachside houses from the 20th century are rapidly being replaced with the larger two story ones.

I was on a poodlewalk with Kayla along the Encounter Bay beach. It was just after sunrise:

Encounter Bay is now my belonging place (home) in the sense that this is where my self belongs. It is where my identity formation as a photographer has formed. A sense of grounding in place provides a solid basis on which to build a sense of identity. This carries with it a sense of responsibility of caring for place that feeds back into, and reinforces, the cohesion of a sense of place. It implies how we as a geographically bounded community collectively learn to live with one another on this earth.

Fleurieuscapes as place not landscape

As I mentioned in this post on the poodlewalks blog, I have neglected the Fleurieuscapes project because of my focus on other projects. Though I have been plugging away in a desultory and sporadic fashion, but I really unsure of what I am trying to do with this body of work from my coastal-based photographic practice. Photography, I've realised is good at showing and lousy at explaining. So what an I going to show?

The project is about place, and it is different to the Littoral Zone, Abstraction and Tree projects, even if it does incorporate the odd image from these other projects. Place in the sense of the space of the Fleurieu Peninsula, where people live and have made this space their home. So though Fleurieuscapes incorporates nature it also looks at the built environment at a specific historical moment.

seascapes

One of the dominate features of the coastline of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula is the movement of the southern ocean along the shoreline. My access to the shoreline is set by the tides and the waves. The sea dumps the dead birds and fish, the seaweed, shells, and the flotsam on the beach or amongst the granite rock, and it then washes them away.

It is the sea as well as the winds that represents the flux of the shore, and shifts the sand on the beaches at Petrel Cove and at Dep's Beach. The sea is also an ever-present danger.

Despite the Fleurieu Peninsula having a long geological history there are no fossils of extinct boneless animals in the rocks along the granite coast, as is the case amongst the limestone cliffs of the treeless Nullarbor Plain.

However, the sea has been a crucial in the land-forming process in the Fleurieu Peninsula's geological history. What largely accounts for the shape and extent of the Fleurieu Peninsula and its Inman River catchment was glaciation of Antarctic proportions that occurred about 300 million years ago when the Antarctic continent was welded against southern Australia. The Peninsula was shaped by the folding and faulting from the Permian glaciation, which affected much of Australia around 300 million years ago.

The ice mass ground its way across the Fleurieu landscape, and it was channelled through the pre-glacial bedrock valley, such as the Inman Trough. The Peninsula and its Inman River catchment was overridden by a continental ice sheet from the south west, and it moved in a northwesterly direction carving through and across the bedrock.

Hindmarsh estuary

Though the Hindmarsh River doesn't flow during the summer time its estuary is still one of my favourite spots in Victor Harbor:

This part of the coast of Victor Harbor has one of its most popular beaches:--the Hayborough beach, which is very popular with families during the summer holidays. It is also popular for people who enjoy walking along the beach the beginning and the end of the day.

towards a beach culture

The view that bush culture has been the dominant culture in colonial Australia overlooks the culture of the beach and the coast.The coast is neither land or sea, nature or culture, but partakes of both.

The part of the coast that I walk is not the beach--it is between Petrel Cove and Kings Beach which are surf beaches with sandy foreshores. An image of Petrel Cove:

This is a coastal environment where are there few people along the rocks of the foreshore. Most people stroll along the path of the Heritage Trail along the cliff top and only a few venture down to the rocks below.

So there is a sense in which the freedom of the beach (it is public property) extends to the rock foreshore. The immediate hinterland behind the path is farming land--ie., private property. What happens when the farm is eventually sold?

It is divided up into smaller blocs--10 acres--which become holiday places that are often for rent

an alienated art

If the Fleurieuscapes book is to be centred around a poetics of homecoming---with its associated words of dwelling, place, region, abiding and building, then the various words need to be unpacked.

Firstly, we need to unpack what is is meant by poetics. It is broader than poetry in that it implies a creative act that points to something beyond itself. This refers to poiesis or a bringing into being: an unending creative struggle to express that which conditions and informs our worlds of meaning and yet resists being exhaustively articulated in the terms of these worlds.

How does this conception of poetics relate to visual art including photography?

The starting point would have to be Kant, since it was he who first systematically outlined the logical grammar or conceptual machinery of aesthetics though his categorical separation of knowledge /truth as in the natural sciences, morality and aesthetic in modernity into separate domains. In the Critique of Judgement Kant acknowledges that scientific cognition excludes aspects of ourselves from its view of nature and that this must be accounted in other than cognitive terms.

He does this in terms of an aesthetics that is based on the imagination, autonomous art, intuition, aesthetic ideas, taste and the lack of concept. Kant, in other words, in inscribing art with the autonomous domain of the aesthetic relegates art and aesthetics to what is outside truth and goodness. Autonomous art is autonomous from truth and morality.

the poetics of homecoming

I have tentatively started to develop the idea of photographing the fleeting moments in the ordinary into a poetics of homecoming. What I have in mind is that my photographing humble things--an example is this body of work by Yamamoto Masao ----- emerges into a concern with homecoming in response to the state of homelessness in our contemporary world.

Homecoming can be considered along the lines of an overcoming of the state of homelessness. The philosophic conception of the homeless condition has its roots in Nietzsche's discourse on nihilism in modernity, which he understood in terms of the emptying out of the highest values hitherto.

Nietzsche's account is that the erosion of the highest values hitherto means that these values are losing influence and meaning for us, and that we have fallen out of the traditional stories or grand narratives. We are uprooted, and live a nomadic existence in a world without certainty, value, or purpose. We have dispensed with all the prevailing ideals, values and myths that traditionally provide solace. We are no longer at home anywhere, and there is a longing for a place in which they can be at home. Hence the state of homesickness with its nostalgic aching for a home where we belong.

Homecoming is an at-homeness, whilst the poetics (as poiesis) is a form of mediative thinking about the presence of place. This is contrast with the poet/photographer being in exile, always remaining in the foreign, and in a constant state of exodus ( as held by Maurice Blanchot and Gilles Deleuze).