Domestic coastal architecture is primarily a space for living within. Traditionally the buildings are sparse and functional. They are summer holiday houses simply built. Their exteriors are so ordinary as to pass unnoticed.
At Encounter Bay the 1940-50s houses are slowly being pulled down and grander seaside designs are being built. 51 Franklin Parade, Encounter Bay is a recent example:
We went for a an exploratory drive through the hills of the Fleurieu Peninsula towards Yankalilla to become more familiar with the back country roads in our local region. I used the trip in this place to scope some future photographic possibilities. Yankalilla is on the western side of the Peninsula. It is not often that we venture to the western Fleurieu Peninsula.
We started the trip driving along the roads that were familiar with --the ones that Suzanne had walked along when she did the Heysen Trail (Tugwell Rd + Keen Rd). Then we turned west along Hancock Rd and spent a bit of time wandering around, and exploring, the ruins of this Congressional Church at Bald Hills on Hancock Rd. It was our only stop on the trip to Yankallila.
After leaving the ruins of the church we continued along Hancock Rd, turned right into Mayfield Rd, then left into the Inman Valley Rd, which runs east/west across the Peninsula. We drove west along the Inman Valley Rd to the outskirts of the Yankalilla township. We turned around before entering the Yankalilla township, drove back along the Inman Valley Rd before turning into Torrens Vale Rd. We then drove along Parawa Rd up to Range Rd, which is one of the main east west roads across the Peninsula.
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.