penny coss island
DESCRIPTION
2011 Exhibition CatalogueTRANSCRIPT
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
Landscape and the matrix of imagination: an emptying out?
I often spend time walking through my local wetland region. In the span of these walks, thoughts give way to the act of walking, to
the rhythm of my body, present as I progress through the landscape. Unseen cambers and obstacles threaten my fall and brought to
the studio as I tease the natural laws of gravity with my paint in a race against time.
These local wetlands, bordered by an urban fringe, are unclaimed spaces, a ‘no man’s land’. Part memory, imagination and
reinvention, this place is my muse. With their diminishing water bodies the colours of dark glass, rise and fall. These breathe a hidden
history. That part of landscape 'that remains uncultivated is partly the memory it preserves of what hasn’t happened yet'.1
In the studio the drying pools of paint are aided by a traversing brush or rag with impatient rhythm, building histories absent but not
yet present. I paint the terrain in the heavy hot air that turns thin to cold during the dark winter months.
Recent and past urban planning of a dystopian force has made its ‘claim’ on these wetland areas and paved the way for orderly plots,
planted vegetation over once dredged lakes and a leveling of the ground over once meandering tracks of a purposeful nature and
bundled together with little connection to the historical terrain. With their diminishing water bodies this once creative region2 is
stymied with the matrix of imagination emptying out and so to fall in line with one concrete path to blindly follow.
Penny Coss 2011
1 Page 86 Paul Carter, Ground Truthing, Explorations in a Creative region. 2010 UWAP publishing IBSN 9781742580708
2 See Paul Carter, Ground Truthing, Explorations in a Creative region.
Perth Galleries
92 Stirling Highway, North Fremantle WA 6159
Telephone: 08-9433 4414 facsimile: 08-9433 4415
E-mail: [email protected]
www.perthgalleries.com.au