‘Shark Bay Swim’

’30 Days of Winter’, Day 2

‘Shark Bay Swim’ 

The ocean around Shark Bay in South Australia is home to one of the largest concentrations of Great White Sharks in the world. Not far down the road is the Great White Shark Museum and many surfers, divers and swimmers have had “encounters” with the creatures.

Lonely, inhospitable, the wide Australian malevolence writ large; best to turn back, go home, watch television and for god’s sake, don’t go in the water. Alone.

‘Small-scapes’

’30 Days of Winter’, Day 1

‘Small-scapes’

This is a four-piece series of paintings which I have titled, for some reason, ‘Small-scapes”.

It is inspired by the arid Australian landscape, specifically based on a series of photographs I took whilst on trips to western NSW in 2009, 2010 and 2011. Done with immediacy and simple technique, the naïveté is intended.

Acrylic paint, oil paint, oil stick and pen ink on found plastic, approx 10cm x 20cm.

This is the first instalment in an intended 30-day project, during which I aim to make/complete at least one artwork per day, in a project itself titled “30 Days of Winter” . See the outline of that here …

Trackmarks in Haukijärvi

On cold February nights in Finland
I slept with the curtains wide open
for the first few weeks.
By the light of a moon or
just the sheer bright
whiteness of the snow
which covered the ground
and hung in the trees,
I was able to look out
at the black branches
moving in the breeze
as the edge of storm swept in
from Siberia and Europe froze.
But February moved on
and the days began to dawn sunny
and walks down slip-ice roads
increasingly revealed
activity in the night,
movement occurring across the fields,
the trackmarks on unknown animals
making unknown progress to
unknown places.
It was in those later weeks that
I closed my curtains at night,
other unknown footsteps
possibly being seen
beneath my window sill.

The Great Poetry Translation Project

My friend Tamara Don is living in Paris, where she is working as, among other things, a translator. And on my recent visit to the City of Light, she and I discussed the idea of translating some of my poems from English into French. Needless to say, I was excited by this prospect and thus we agreed to begin working on series of such translations together.

It is coming along nicely and I find the results very interesting … I’d never really thought about how hard translating poetry might be, the need to balance the correct intended nuance with the nuance of another language, plus trying to convey the rhythm of the sentences etcetera.

Anyway, as I said, it is coming along, and Tamara is doing a great job. So great in fact, there are plans to translate some of my poems into a third language. I shall leave that undisclosed for now, but for the moment, here are a couple of the initial translations.

First in English

Hall Street                                                    by Adam Gibson ©
Killing time on Hall Street
the lost heart of Bondi
the commercial strip of
things getting done
and backpackers
expert on everything
after just one week
in town
(of course)

And then in French

Hall Street                                                    by Adam Gibson ©

Tuer le temps à Hall Street
le centre oublié de Bondi
la zone commerciale où
les tâches sont accomplies
et les routards
sont experts en toutes choses
après une petite semaine
en ville
(bien sûr).

And another one…

Beware                                                    by Adam Gibson ©

beware of cars with hats behind the back seat
beware of girls with hip-length hair
beware of days with still still mornings
beware of funk bands
beware of those who are silent on politics
beware of journalists
beware of ‘team players’
beware of the westerly
beware of nylon shower curtains that stick to your shins
beware of those who don’t leave messages on answering machines
beware of moths
beware of “Ciao”
beware of endings
beware of full stops (.)

And then in French…

Prenez garde                                                    by Adam Gibson ©

gare aux voitures qui cachent des chapeaux à l’arrière
gare aux filles dont les cheveux tombent jusqu’à la taille
gare aux journées qui commencent par des matinées trop tranquilles
gare aux groupes de funk
gare aux politiquement silencieux
gare aux journalistes
gare à ceux qui ont ‘l’esprit d’équipe’
gare aux vents de l’ouest
gare aux rideaux de douche en nylon qui collent aux jambes
gare à ceux qui ne laissent jamais de messages sur les répondeurs
gare aux mites
gare aux « Ciao »
gare aux fins
gare aux points (.)

That is it for now, but stay tuned for more updates soon.

The Basin

One strange era ago, I went for a few days to stay at an isolated shack above on a waterway north of Sydney, near to which lies a mysterious circular land/water formation known as The Basin. We had to catch a boat there, the only way in and out.

Somebody died that weekend.

The landline phone was ringing in the night for a long long time.

The room was lit by candlelight because we had turned the generator off earlier after a few beers as darkness came in, cold and half-moon-lit in the silent bush.

She didn’t want to answer the phone because she knew for certain it was bad news. Why else would it be ringing for so long?

Eventually she did answer it, and the news was worse than could be imagined.

Left clinging to a bed beneath an old mosquito curtain, we raged through the night, exhausting ourselves so we could sleep, seeing the deepest of deep waters of The Basin shining silver down below in the moonlight as we saw life from the inside out.

The next morning, we caught the first boat back to the “mainland” and re-entered a world where everything had changed.

The draining of the Basin

The tree-view, lost time

The bottles that were drunk

Time now gone

Convict ghosts

The warp of wood of old Australia

The Hill That Got Broke

Broken Hill in far western NSW, Australia, is a remote town that has seen better decades. Wide empty streets are lined with old buildings and shops and houses once frequented by the miners who once used to make the town a massively productive mining town and the birthplace of Australian trade unionism.

But as the years have passed and the mines have progressively closed, there is a sense that the town can scarcely believe what has befallen it. Those big pubs with the wide verandas that once roared with shouts and screams and beers and talk are now often, largely, empty. Shadowed corridors lead to shadowed rooms and the ghosts of better days haunt empty hallways and back bars and bistros that haven’t been open in years.

This is all my impression anyway. From the several visits I have made there, I have sensed that the town is in shock about this and while the street names themselves (Sulphide Street, Bromide Street etc) echo with names from the mining history, the decline is terminal and nothing will ever bring back those halcyon days.

I know that many good and worthy people are working hard to transform Broken Hill into an arts centre, and there is indeed a lot of artwork being done there, but to me such an attempted regeneration only comes when the original point of somewhere has been declared dead and buried.

So anyway … I am in the process of doing pulling together a cohesive work about this idea, and ‘The Hill That Got Broke’ is a photographic sample of that.

Here ya go:

Wide balcony land.

Those dark corridors.

Here be ghosts.

Somebody’s out there, somebody’s waiting.

No face in the mirror.

Looking out.

Her Majesty.

Essentials.

Lonely, strange nude.

Those Finnish gals

One of the things I loved about my recent stay in Finland at the Arteles Creative Center in rural Finland was the culture of second-hand stores and the recycling of material that seems to be a nice part of what I felt was a Finnish collectivism; a sense that if something is not useful to you, it may be useful to someone else and so one should give it away.

In Hameenkyro, and also in Tampere and Helsinki, it is very common to find large and well-stocked stores selling secondhand goods often of very high quality and certainly of very cool calibre. In general, I feel the often extreme climate in the country engenders an “outsider” mentality and I think this finds manifestation in the often eccentric clothes people wear and a general sense that you can be just as you wish to be, within the boundaries of course of a culture that seems conservative on one level, and yet wholly “out there” on another.

Anyway … In my desire to make a physical artwork that spoke to that sense of slightly askew eccentricity, I found an old magazine in what we called the “free store” in Hameenkyro (where most of the items were free… See https://vimeo.com/36089700). This magazine, from the late 1970s, featured some great Finnish knitwear designs, and some even greater photos of some very pretty models wearing those designs. Initially I wasn’t sure what to do with those images, but knew I would do something with them.

And so it came to pass that two days later, in another second-hand store, this one a massive emporium called “LA” on the road south a bit in the direction of Helsinki three hours away, I found what I believe are the wooden ticketing address tags for some item of, perhaps, Finnish farm machinery. These were about 20cm by 10cm and sold for 50 euro cents each. I bought 20 of them. 10 euros in total. Again, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with these, but knew I would do something.

When I returned on the icy roads to Arteles and looked at the two items sitting on my workbench there, it suddenly struck me… These two essentially “Finnish” items needed to go together. They belonged to one and other.

And so I then set about creating a work which combined the two, the Finnish magazine gals and the Finnish farm machinery wooden tickets. Using a lacquer/resin-like substance I bought in a store in Tampere, I fixed the gals to the tickets, the two became one, and, in my mind, I created a work that spoke to the appealing sense of oddity that I really enjoyed in Finland.

Here are some examples of the result (I made 20 but felt these were a nice totem representation of my time in Finland and thus gave several away in both Finland and when I subsequently toured around Europe).

The wooden “ticket” (above).

Three of my ladies.

A hand in the picture for an idea of scale.

Front and back.

What a great sort!

I’d surely marry this cutie.

WHAT an outfit!

Two more beauties, in sensational outfits.

Hot stuff!

Looking cool whilst keeping warm.

Finland Finland, the country where I’d like to be

My recent stay in Finland at the Arteles Creative Center in Hameenkyro was simply fantastic, and I’d like to be back there now. I cannot do so however, so I will have to visit vicariously through my videos and other work made there. More details of the other work will be posted here shortly, but in the meantime, the videos are available here on Vimeo. Here is one: ‘100 percent made in Finland’

And another, ‘The Last Tim Tam’