Tidal Meditation (Turtle Swamp, Canaipa & Deanbilla Bay, Minjerribah), May – August 2019

Since beginning as an artist member of the Ferny Hills Painter’s Group convened by artist educator Audrey Kelk, the Northside Creative Artists Association in Brisbane and the Brisbane School of Art with artist educator Irene Amos in 1977 and 1978 its almost 43 years now that I have been involved with artist collectives and groups in Australia and overseas.

From March 2018 until November 2019 I had the pleasure to be involved with two local Canaipa artist collectives; ‘Canaipa Mudlines’ and ‘Trica Dobson’s Weaving Circles’ . These two groups include local artists who focus on and feature personal and collaborative creative responses to art and ecology in the SMBI [Southern Moreton Bay Islands] region on Quandamooka country.

‘Field Notes – Walking Meditation’, is part of the ‘Tidal Meditations’ series of video and sound works. This particular work was made as a response to the Canaipa Mudlines site generated residency in May 2019 at Deenbilla Bay and is imagined as a queer walking meditation composition. It draws on my earlier art and ecology work where personal walking meditations are performed as a way to contemplate and reflect on the impermanence of life.

We acknowledge the Quandamooka People as the traditional custodians of the lands in which we live, make and work where sovereignty was never ceded. We pay respects to their elders and their youth, past, present and emerging – and stand in sovereignty with the Uluru Statement from the Heart and their ongoing resistance against colonisation.