Driving home from the Gallery – a palimpsest
When art has left a second sight, silver birches lining the lake seem stilled in a slow dance to white scratches on metal sky. Cows stippled on a yellow hill seem blacker, guard rails flare like neon installations, the sun daubs peroxide tips on cross-hatched winter grasses, bending to meet us eye to eye, refracting gold through the purpling day. It finds pale gums glowing in patient bushland patches, sidelined by the highway, present as bones in an X-ray, shimmering through scenic film, they conjure another landscape – hills with names, grasses in song, Wiradjuri, Ngarigo, Yuin. Sleeping country watches still, as dusk falls and suburbs fill, her dreams gleaming where the scrim frays. The canvas offers two threads, its chambray of black warp, white weft, both loosening as all ancient paths are cut by the asphalt treadmill, all sacred names left cold. Yet behind glass we drive on, missing calls of currawongs, though pliant blackbird sings as evening chills, we barely ken the fading land’s archaic lai. |