SCOTT A. PRICE

RADIAL ECOLOGIES

SWAN RIVER | DERBARL YERRIGAN

WALYUNGA - KULJAK - BAIGUP

 

 

Radial Ecologies is a site response to Swan River. It is an alternative approach to landscape; an attempt to close the gap with nature.

 

Paperbark and leaves are set upon the surface of the paper, washed with watercolour, still wet. Capillary action traces the material elements of the site as they touch the paper, traveling the narrow spaces of their texture. They leave their mark, like fingerprints, as the pigment pools and dries in the friction ridges. The blackened fingers of burnt eucalypts trace their way across the surface of the paper, washed by yellow ochre and dirt stained red by oxidised iron, drawing themselves into the work and recording its movement through the land. The site speaks itself through the emergence of the work; a co-responsible co-production.

 

The problem of landscape is the problem of how we relate to land. How does one paint the land properly?

 

The experience of being within land becomes categorised as ‘place’ to be represented as landscape through the act of incising it from the radiating whole. The actual logic of the land is nodal, parallel, fragmentary. The river on a map exists as an unbroken linear flow from beginning to end, a blue line of varying thickness winding its way through space; but to walk the river in the summer is a different experience. You could almost walk half the length of the river on dry riverbed from its source at Walyunga National Park to Bells Rapids. The actual experience is one of fragmented, evaporating pools of brackish water and algae and salt encrusted silt; nodal ecologies that radiate inward and outward in an infinite network. Swan River at its terminus is not a river but an estuary in polygeny with Canning River, meaning the sea flows into the river as much as the river flows into the sea.

 

These works were made embedded in Walyunga National Park at the source of Swan River in Western Australia during summer and early autumn when the river bed was dry and the river little more than a series of disconnected algae pools. It is a delving into, and collaboration with, the natural environment of the river and its surrounding ecology explored through watercolour, indexical mark making techniques, and natural ochre washes. At times I dragged the paper through the environment, across the burnt fingers of Eucalypts and Wattle, and was caught in rainstorms as the waters began to return to the river.