Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Antonios Schneider
From the series A light of its own
2023
Digital photograph
And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
Too call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.
.
Raymond Carver. ‘Late Fragment’ from A New Path to the Waterfall, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989
This posting offers a selection of photographs from my new 269 image sequence A light of its own (2023). To see the whole extended conversation please visit my website.
The starting point for this series was a black and white image from the Second World War of a German soldier looking at writing that has been scrawled in heavy chalk on the side of an armoured vehicle. ‘Aus der Traum’ translates as ‘From the Dream’.
As the series developed the work, as is its want, took on a life, light of its own. I use the photographs of war and its effects as part hallucinogenic, technicolour dream and part exploration “… not to follow optically the ‘line of ideas’ in the text or in a picture and see only the representation proper, the surface, but to probe with the eyes the pictorial texture and even to enter the texture.”1
Martin Jay. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkley: University of California Press, 1993, p. 512.
.
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ print costs $1,000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see the Store web page.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Tobacco
From the series A light of its own
2023
Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) City (destruction)
From the series A light of its own
2023
Digital photograph
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Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Destroyer
From the series A light of its own
2023
Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Emanation
From the series A light of its own
2023
Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Flick
From the series A light of its own
2023
Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Goggles
From the series A light of its own 2023
Digital photograph
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Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Gun
From the series A light of its own
2023
Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Helmet
From the series A light of its own
2023
Digital photograph
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Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Katyusha
From the series A light of its own
2023
Digital photograph
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Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Men
From the series A light of its own
2023
Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Prisoner
From the series A light of its own
2023
Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Aus der Traum
From the series A light of its own
2023
Digital photograph
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Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Trees
From the series A light of its own
2023
Digital photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Water
From the series A light of its own
2023
Digital photograph
tongue, long flickering tongue
drenched in blood
scours inside the cup
rapacious for more
blood thirsty luck
sucks souls of men
thorn and star
spirit of insect
bizarre–unique
cannibal
“A lot of humans forget we are organic entities, the same as every other creature on the planet, and we’ve only been here for a short time. I am very pessimistic about the plight of beings. We don’t learn much, I mean, we’ve been wreaking havoc as they did in the Middle Ages. We also have bigger weapons. One thing I am not pessimistic about is the ability of nature to heal itself.”
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Peter Booth quoted in Ashley Crawford View from the Booth blog 29 November 2003
PETER BOOTH at TarraWarra Museum of Art
Introductory wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing at left Painting 1974, and at centre Painting 1975 1975 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
While the TarraWarra survey features a collection of Booth’s works from the 1970s to the 2000s, it opens with a work in the ‘Doorway’ series: Painting, 1974. It’s a canvas covered with shades of black. As the curator says, “Just near the top, there’s this very thin horizon line of red, and it feels like there’s this massive magma just behind the surface that’s starting to seep through.” I’m told that written on the back of some ‘Doorway’ paintings is an instruction: “Never hang more than six inches from the floor.” As Fitzpatrick explains, “If you hang the work a little lower for the viewer … it becomes more immersive, and this painting is the opening work in the exhibition with the idea of the doorway as a threshold.”
This minimalism is compelling. “The ‘Doorway’ series could be about nothingness, or it could be a void,” says Fitzpatrick, “but voids are also where things are generated from – so they could be about an idea of fullness … you could almost see them as a kind of dark mirror.” In a rare interview with Australian artist, writer and curator Peter Hill, Booth humbly discusses how the ‘Doorway’ series was “influenced by what was going on in the art world at the time, in reduction, minimalism and colour field painting”.
With its shrouded figure standing before a highly volatile and fiery landscape, Painting 1977 conveys a forceful and undeniably apocalyptic vision. The painting finds a literary counterpart in the work of one of Booth’s favourite writers at the time, the novelist Doris Lessing with whom he found an affinity in their shared dystopian outlook. With its powerful blend of fantasy and reality, her 1971 novel Briefing for a Descent into Hell recounts the tale, vividly narrated in the first person, of a psychiatric patient’s hallucinatory journey through a dangerous and disturbing world of environmental despoliation, societal collapse, violent conflict and cosmic cataclysm.
Wall text from the exhibition
Doris Lessing (British-Zimbabwean born Iran, 1919-2013) Briefing for a Descent into Hell 1971
Vintage book cover published 1981
Peter Booth (Australian born England, b. 1940, Australia from 1958) Untitled (Daughters)
c. 1976
Ink on paper
11 x 12.5cm
Private collection
Untitled (Daughters), c. 1976, is a composition which originated in Booth’s visits to an inner-city park in Melbourne where he would take his young daughters to play. Here, through the intense rhythms of his lifework and cross hatching in black ink, and the introduction of symbolic forms such as a whirlpool and arrowhead, this everyday scene is imaginatively transformed into a mysterious, nocturnal realm. While his daughters play in the foreground, the artist has turned to face a rising moon on the horizon and there is a sense that he is being magnetically compelled to embark on the path which leads in its direction.
Text from the TarraWarra Museum of Art Facebook page
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing at centre, Painting 1978 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of Peter Booth Painting 1978 from the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Peter Booth became known for his black, minimal ‘doorway’ paintings of 1970-74. Yet by 1977 he had given up this style and begun to record the world of his dreams and nightmares in a series of apocalyptic, visionary landscapes. Booth’s paintings suggest that we are on the edge of another dark age. His paintings are brutal representations of his bleak dreams and fantasies. In an age of nuclear threat Booth’s work has a monumentality which is evocative of the final conflagration mentioned in The Book of Revelations. Painting 1978, challenges and disturbs the viewer by the artist’s choice of colour and method of painting. The dramatic black and red, yellow and white composition suggests both an industrial and a natural wasteland. The heavy impasto paint texture describes, with vigour and intensity, flames, explosions, and unidentified nightmarish images. Contradictory forces pull us into the central inferno below the glacial mountain peaks, and showers of rock explode towards us. Is it the artist himself who stands with his back to us, mesmerised by the scene, while grotesque metamorphosing figures stare out at us?
Booth’s subject matter largely concerns the Australian landscape, both urban and rural, and the relationship between environment and individual, as well as the individual’s capacity to create and destroy. And also what the world will be like in the future, humans as mutants.
Booth’s landscapes are charged with emotion and symbolic meaning. Memories of his childhood in the blackened industrial landscape of Sheffield seem to infuse the work, especially his well-known apocalyptic figurative paintings, which look like images of the end of the world; illustrations for The Book of Revelation. These images contain an intense image of anxiety, evoking the aftermath of some terrible destruction, vividly pictured with menacing forms and agitated, heavily applied brushstrokes.
An example is Painting 1978 which has been described as challenging and disturbing the viewer by the artist’s choice of colour and method of painting. “The dramatic black and red, yellow and white composition suggests both an industrial and a natural wasteland”. The heavy impasto paint texture describes, with vigour and intensity, flames, explosions, and unidentified nightmarish images. Contradictory forces pull us into the central inferno below the glacial mountain peaks, and showers of rock explode towards us.
Is it the artist himself who stands with his back to us, mesmerised by the scene, while grotesque metamorphosing figures stare out at us?” Peter Booth has centred many of his paintings around his childhood in Sheffield England where he grew up during the war years and their aftermath.
Anonymous. “Peter Booth,” on the Art History Essay website Nd [Online] Cited 07/02/2023
Peter Booth (Australian born England, b. 1940, Australia from 1958) Drawing (Figure with Insect Tail)
1982
Pastel and casein on paper
17.3 x 12.5cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchase, Victorian Foundation of Living Australian Artists, 2010
More than just figures of fantasy, Booth’s curious amalgams and mutated figures often express his personal insights into the interrelatedness of all living beings. With his closed eyes and restful expression, the metamorphic figure in Drawing (Figure with Insect Tail) appears contented with his hybrid condition, affirming the artist’s belief that humans “share something with these creatures … we are part of the same thing.”
Text from the TarraWarra Museum of Art Facebook page
William Blake (British, 1757-1827) The Ghost of a Flea
c. 1819
Tempera heightened with gold on mahogany
214 x 162 mm
Tate
Bequeathed by W. Graham Robertson 1949
Another physiognomic “vision” – “the stuff of delirium and nightmare, [which] taps into the unconscious, internalised sublime” – was the painting The Ghost of a Flea (c. 1819) used to illustrate John Varley’s Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy (1828). In studying the work of Blake for this posting, I found it instructive to look at Blake’s preparatory sketches for his works which can be found online. They give you a good idea of the spontaneity of the drawing and the ideas that arise, transformed into the finished work. Here in the graphite on paper drawing of The Ghost of a Flea we can see Blake’s initial vision, a more static, pensive figure with serrated wings which morphs into a muscular, blood sucking monster set on a cosmic stage, of life framed by curtains and a shooting star. As the vision appeared to Blake he is said to have cried out: ‘There he comes! his eager tongue whisking out of his mouth, a cup in his hand to hold blood, and covered with a scaly skin of gold and green.’
Marcus Bunyan. “Visions of divine damnation” on the exhibition William Blake at Tate Britain, London Part 2, February 2020 on the Art Blart website [Online] Cited 09/02/2023
Artist and astrologer John Varley encouraged Blake to sketch the figures, called ‘visionary heads’, who populated his visions. This image is the best known. While sketching the flea, Blake claimed it told him that fleas were inhabited by the souls of bloodthirsty men, confined to the bodies of insects because, if they were the size of horses, they would literally drain the population. Their bloodthirsty nature is shown by the eager tongue flicking at the ‘blood’ cup it carries. This intense disorientating image, the stuff of delirium and nightmare, taps into the unconscious, internalised sublime.
William Blake, “The Ghost of a Flea c. 1819-20,” in Nigel Llewellyn and Christine Riding (eds.), The Art of the Sublime, Tate Research Publication, January 2013
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing from left to right, Painting Two 1984, Painting 1984 and Leadman 1986 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In the blasted landscape of Painting Two we are presented with a vision of a volatile world in the process of unnatural mutation. As an artist who has always been keenly attuned to what’s happening environmentally and politically, this painting forcefully conveys the fallout of a colossal act of destruction, reflecting widespread concerns in the 1980s over the dramatic escalation of the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union and the threat of atomic warfare.
In this work a hulking grey figure, with his fierce determination and body braced for battle, appears to be biologically adapted for survival in a desolated terrain. As the title suggests, this unrelentingly bleak and polluted atmosphere has eventuated from the unbridled destructive ambitions of the toxic Leadman who has transformed the world in his own image.
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing from left to right, Leadman 1986, Painting 1984 and Painting 2012 Photos: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (English, 1757-1827) Thenot Remonstrates with Colinet Thenot Under a Fruit Tree Thenot Remonstrates with Colinet, Lightfoot in the Distance Colinet Departs in Sorrow, a Thunder-Scarred Tree on the Right Blasted Tree and Blighted Crops The Good Shepherd Chases Away the Wolf Sabrina’s Silvery Flood Colinet’s Fond Desire Strange Lands to Know
1821
From The Pastorals of Virgil adapted by R.J. Thornton, 3rd edition. F.C. & J. Rivington et al., London 1921
Wood engravings on thin, white handmade wove paper
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased 1960 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
William Blake (English, 1757-1827) Blasted tree and blighted crops
1821
From The Pastorals of Virgil adapted by R.J. Thornton, 3rd edition. F.C. & J. Rivington et al., London 1921
Wood engraving on thin, white handmade wove paper
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased 1960
William Blake (English, 1757-1827) The Good Shepherd Chases Away the Wolf
1821
From The Pastorals of Virgil adapted by R.J. Thornton, 3rd edition. F.C. & J. Rivington et al., London 1921
Wood engraving on thin, white handmade wove paper
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased 1960
William Blake (English, 1757-1827) Colinet’s Fond Desire Strange Lands to Know
1821
From The Pastorals of Virgil adapted by R.J. Thornton, 3rd edition. F.C. & J. Rivington et al., London 1921
Wood engraving on thin, white handmade wove paper
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased 1960
Cabinet text from the exhibition Photo: Marcus Bunyan
A survey exhibition of the work of the renowned Australian artist Peter Booth
With a remarkable career spanning several decades, Melbourne-based Booth is a unique voice in Australian art. This new survey of paintings and works on paper is the first major public gallery exhibition of Peter Booth’s work since the NGV retrospective in 2003 and features a number of the artist’s most significant works from the 1970s to 1990s, alongside important recent works from the past two decades.
The exhibition is presented thematically, honing in on and highlighting particular motifs, subjects and moods which have become hallmarks of Booth’s expansive oeuvre: stillness and turbulence, alterity and alienation, mutation and hybridity, the absurd and the grotesque, the road and the ruin, and the despoliation and the resilience of nature.
A small group of abstract paintings from the mid-1970s at the start of the exhibition provide a prelude to an important series of gestural paintings which mark the beginning of the artist’s journey into the highly expressive landscape and figure subjects which have characterised his practice since that time.
The exhibition progresses through Booth’s vivid imaginings of an apocalyptic world characterised by grotesque, unsettling, and at times absurd scenes of human and hybrid figures in varying states of apprehension, aggression and conflict. These works will be accompanied by a small selection of prints by William Blake, James Ensor, Francisco Goya, and Samuel Palmer, visionary artists who have been important touchstones for Booth and with whom he shares a number of affinities.
This survey also brings together important works from the past three decades to convey humanity’s often fraught and ambiguous relationship to the natural world, revealing Booth’s extraordinary capacity to transmute his intensely personal perceptions of the mysteries and forces of nature and the folly and hubris of human endeavours, into exceptional and deeply compelling paintings and drawings.
PETER BOOTH, curated by Anthony Fitzpatrick, is generously supported by The Balnaves Foundation.
Text from the TarraWarra Museum of Art website
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing from left to right, Untitled 1997, Painting 1982 and Painting 1981 Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In Doris Lessing’s 1974 novel, The Memoirs of a Survivor, in the aftermath of an unspecified disaster, civilisation gradually disintegrates into anarchy as hordes of people form ad hoc tribes in the city streets to increase their chances of survival. In this dystopian narrative, Lessing describes the irrational and aggressive behaviour that can be unleashed within the safety and obscurity of a large group. This same sense of apprehension is one that Booth shares in many of his depictions of crowds. In Untitled, 1997, a large throng of men forms a single, impenetrable wall, gathered together to cheer on the spectacle of a violent struggle. Disturbing and absurd in equal measure, this work graphically portrays the violent actions that can be incited by a mob.
Wall text from the exhibition
Doris Lessing (British-Zimbabwean born Iran, 1919-2013) The Memoirs of a Survivor
1974
Penguin Random House book cover published 1988
Another scene of demonic possession enacted under the spell of a fiendish presence, Painting 1982, confronts the viewer with a deeply disturbing vision of human cannibalism. With its visceral imagery of mutilation and dismemberment, parallels have been drawn to the atrocities depicted in Goya’s series of etchings The Disasters of War, 1810-1815, while the highly theatrical quality of the painting suggests a more recent connection to George A. Romero’s cult zombie film Night of the Living Dead, 1968. When the work was first exhibited critics responded to what the painting conveyed about the current state of western mass culture, finding in its brutal imagery a powerful metaphor for greed and material consumption. Whichever way one choses to interpret this work, one thing remains clear, whenever a large group of men get together in Booth’s painting, there is always the potential for danger.
Wall text from the exhibition
Francisco Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828) Saturn Devouring His Son
c. 1819-1823
Mixed media mural transferred to canvas
143.5 cm × 81.4cm (56.5 in × 32.0 in)
Museo del Prado, Madrid
Saturn Devouring His Son is a painting by Spanish artist Francisco Goya. It is traditionally interpreted as a depiction of the Greek myth of the Titan Cronus (known as Saturn in Roman mythology) eating one of his offspring. Fearing a prophecy foretold by Gaea that predicted he would be overthrown by one of his children, Saturn ate each one upon their birth. The work is one of the 14 so-called Black Paintings that Goya painted directly on the walls of his house sometime between 1819 and 1823. It was transferred to canvas after Goya’s death and is now in the Museo del Prado in Madrid. …
Various interpretations of the meaning of the picture have been offered: the conflict between youth and old age, time as the devourer of all things, the wrath of God and an allegory of the situation in Spain, where the fatherland consumed its own children in wars and revolution. There have been explanations rooted in Goya’s relationships with his own son, Xavier, the only of his six children to survive to adulthood, or with his live-in housekeeper and possible mistress, Leocadia Weiss; the sex of the body being consumed cannot be determined with certainty. If Goya made any notes on the picture, they have not survived, as he never intended the picture for public exhibition.
In Painting 1981 a blindfolded boor is accompanied by a red-eyed, pointy-eared imp who appears to have just whispered a cosmic joke or secret in his ear. Situated in a bleak and desolate terrain, this disquieting scenario recalls the German legend of Faust in which, following the protagonist’s pact to sell his soul to the Devil in exchange for unlimited knowledge, Mephistopheles appears as his demonic guide. In this light, Booth’s painting can be seen as a powerful reimagining of this cautionary tale of how blind ambition and human hubris can lead to inner corruption and the unleashing of dangerous, irrational impulses.
A survey exhibition of the work of major Australian artist Peter Booth will be held at TarraWarra Museum of Art, 26 November 2022 – 13 March 2023.
With a remarkable career spanning several decades, Melbourne-based Booth is a unique voice in Australian painting and is considered by many to be one of the most significant contemporary artists working in Australia today.
This new survey of paintings and works on paper will be the first major public gallery exhibition of Peter Booth’s work since the NGV retrospective in 2003 and will feature a number of the artist’s most significant works from the 1970s to 1990s, alongside important recent works from the past two decades.
Curated by TarraWarra’s Anthony Fitzpatrick, the exhibition will be presented thematically, honing in on and highlighting particular motifs, subjects and moods which have become hallmarks of Booth’s expansive oeuvre: stillness and turbulence; alterity and alienation; mutation and hybridity; the absurd and the grotesque; the road and the ruin; and the despoilation and the resilience of nature.
“This exhibition will reveal Booth’s extraordinary capacity to transmute his intensely personal perceptions of the mysteries and forces of nature, and the folly and hubris of human endeavours, into exceptional and deeply-compelling paintings and drawings,” Mr Fitzpatrick said.
A small group of abstract paintings from the mid-1970s at the start of the exhibition provide a prelude to an important series of gestural paintings which mark the beginning of the artist’s journey into a neo-expressionist figurative style.
The exhibition progresses through Booth’s vivid imaginings of an apocalyptic world characterised by grotesque, unsettling, and at times absurd scenes of human and hybrid figures in varying states of apprehension, aggression and conflict.
These works will be accompanied by a small selection of prints by William Blake, James Ensor, Francisco Goya, and Samuel Palmer, visionary artists who have been important touchstones for Booth and with whom he shares a number of affinities.
This survey will also bring together important works from the past three decades to convey humanity’s often fraught and ambiguous relationship to the natural world.
“Initially Booth’s highly visceral paintings of fiery, turbulent environments were the stage for confronting and, at times, violent human encounters. Since the 1990s, many of the scenes he has painted have become increasingly depopulated, implicating the viewer who is called to contemplate and navigate their own subjective relationship to these vivid landscapes.
“Most recently, the artist has returned to the apocalyptic imagery that characterised his first forays into figuration, with large-scale paintings of desolate and devastated scenes of a world in a cataclysmic state of collapse. This is art for a time of ecological and existential crisis in which anthropogenic impacts have driven the planet, and its intricate web of ecosystems, to the brink of utter catastrophe,” Mr Fitzpatrick said.
Press release from the TarraWarra Museum of Art
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing at second right, Painting 2022 (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Acheron Way is named after a long snaking road which rises steeply through the rainforest of the Yarra Ranges between Narbethong and Warburton. Pictured beneath a clear blue sky, this scene of animated trees backlit by a soft, yellow light evokes a sense of energy, growth and even hope. The swaying trunks and tentacular forms of the sprawling limbs of the trees painted in thick swathes of impasto, imbue them with a powerful emotional charge. However, there is a more ambiguous aspect to this work alluded to in its title which not only refers to a real location, but also to an infernal realm of the imagination: Acheron (‘river of pain’) one of the rivers of the Underworld in Greek mythology over which the souls of the dead were ferried. From this perspective, the tangled and twisted forms of these sentinel-like trees seem to be denying us access to the light suffused landscape in the distance, forcing us to linger in their shadow, begging the question: are we in the realm of the living or the dead?
Wall text from the exhibition
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing at left Untitled 1998 (below), and at right Painting 2017 (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Peter Booth (Australian born England, b. 1940, Australia from 1958) Painting
2017
Oil on canvas
193.4 x 81.3cm
Courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane
In Painting 2017, as the sun begins to rise over the horizon, new epicormic growth spouts from the pruned limbs of a tree; a potent symbol of resilience and renewal. Peter Booth’s ‘Garden of Eden’ paintings vividly convey his feeling for the elemental and generative qualities found in nature and his fervent empathy for other nonhuman lifeforms. ‘Everything is connected. All life comes from the same source.’
Text from the TarraWarra Museum of Art Facebook page
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing at left Acheron Way 1993, at third right Painting 2022, and at right Painting 2014 (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing at second left Winter 1993 (below), and at right Mount Donna Buang 1991 (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing at left Winter 1993 (below), and at right Mount Donna Buang 1991 (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
In discussing Winter when it was first exhibited in 1994, Booth revealed: it’s about my childhood, about taking walks with my brothers in the woods in Yorkshire. Triggered by a recent return to Sheffield, this memory is transformed into a richly textured landscape of open forest which has been stilled and silenced by a thick blanket of snow. As the artist later revealed, his younger twin brothers died in tragic circumstances adding particular poignancy to this painting and suggesting that the two very similar trees which occupy the centre of the work, could be seen as symbolic representations of his siblings. In this light, Winter becomes a powerful and deeply personal expression of remembrance and cathartic release.
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing at left Painting 2018 (below), and at right Untitled 1995 (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
Installation view of the exhibition Peter Booth at TarraWarra Museum of Art showing at left Painting (Figure with bandaged head) 2004 (below), and at right Painting 1998 (below) Photo: Marcus Bunyan
The strength and power of Painting (Man with Bandaged Head), 2004 … is palpable. But like so many of Booth’s images, formulated over years of development, the strength lies not so much in the initial ‘shock’, but with the ensuing waves of other possible readings it evokes…
The tension between our first confrontation with the bandaged figure and the subsequent sensations of pathos for, even some recognition of sensitivity within, the character makes this such a successful work. And as we look upon the painting, venturing into the space behind the bandages, the focus of the work internalises: in reading the mind of the figure we are offered a portal to see within ourselves.
This notion of the mirror to one’s soul, with themes of the nature of power and frailty, desire and control, so deftly captured within Painting (Man with Bandaged Head), 2004 adds a further dimension to the history of this particular painting.
The figure in Untitled, 2007 has averted eyes and stoically sealed lips, suggesting that he has endured great hardship. This feeling is amplified by the rich tonal contrasts and paint texture built with swathes of impasto which transform his wizened face into a blustery landscape. Having taken the troubles and turmoil of the world into himself, this austere figure is imbued with a powerful sense of inner fortitude and resilience.
Text from the TarraWarra Museum of Art Facebook page
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Women in orange
London 2017
From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022
Digital colour photograph
This posting offers a selection of photographs from my new ninety-eight image sequence The sun does not move (2017-2022). To see the whole extended conversation please visit my website. The text below illuminates the rationale for the work…
Two students were arguing about a flag flapping in the wind. “It’s the wind that is really moving,” stated the first one. “No, it is the flag that is moving,” contended the second. A Zen master, who happened to be walking by, overheard the debate and interrupted them. “Neither the flag nor the wind is moving,” he said, “It is MIND that moves.”
The photographs in this sequence meditate on the idea that it is the mind of the viewer that constructs the spaces and meanings of these images. It is MIND that moves. The title of this sequence the sun does not move is attributed to Italian polymath Galileo Galilei.
The photographs are not a contemporary dissection of some archaic concept or hidden historical moment. They just are. Why do I make them? Because I feel impelled to be creative, to explore the spiritual in liminal spaces that I find across the earth. Ultimately, I make them for myself, to illuminate the journey that this soul is on.
With wonder and affection and empathy and feeling for the spaces placed before it. As clear as light is for the ‘mind’s eye’.
With thankx to the few “fellow travellers” for their advice and friendship.
“To try to see more and better is not a matter of whim or curiosity or self-indulgence. To see or to perish is the very condition laid upon everything that makes up the universe, by reason of the mysterious gift of existence.”
.
Teilhard de Chardin, Seeing 1947
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ print costs $1,000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see the Store web page.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Brick pattern
London 2017
From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Sliver
France 2017
From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Bus depot
South London 2017
From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Gare du Nord
Paris 2017
From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Blue/White
London 2017
From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Tomb effigy
V&A Museum, London 2017
From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Float
Paris 2017
From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Scar
Paris 2017
From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Circle, two white lines, four pieces of white and a trail of dark oil
Paris 2017
From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Couple in light
Paris 2017
From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) The crossing
Paris 2017
From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Equilibrium
Tuileries, Paris 2017
From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Leaving
Paris 2017
From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) The sun does not move, it’s your mind that moves…
France 2017
From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Crystallize
France 2017
From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Hand in hand
France 2017
From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) We might be otherwise – we might be all
Paris 2017
From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Every kind of pleasure
Paris 2017
From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Eiffel Tower II
Paris 2017
From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Profusion
Paris 2017
From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Ancient and modern
V&A Museum, London 2017
From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Two black holes
V&A Museum, London 2017
From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) The Wheel of Time
V&A Museum, London 2017
From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Where is the love, beauty, and truth we seek (Shelley)
France 2017
From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Modernisation
Montparnasse, Paris 2017
From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) The light whose smile kindles the universe
Palace of Fontainebleau, France 2017
From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022
Digital colour photograph
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) The unknown thought I
Paris 2017
From the series The sun does not move 2017-2022
Digital colour photograph
While conceptually based (as with much contemporary photography), her bodies of work have an elemental quality to them that keeps them grounded and present even as they reference a historical past, a “felt” (pardon the pun since Ferran uses felt material) response to a present day conundrum.
The new work Birdlike “continues the artist’s practice of photographing female performers as they improvise with lengths of coloured felt … [which] allows for complex and nuanced interpretations” in response to the initial proposition, in this case Ferran’s wish “to summon the return of a small ground-dwelling bird, the Plains wanderer, Pedionomus torquatus, to a place that it vanished from long ago.”
These birds “are surprisingly distinct from any other species on the planet, they are the last family on their evolutionary line,” the only representative of family Pedionomidae and genus Pedionomus. They are threatened by agricultural practices such as cropping and grazing, and so they are at risk of habitat loss, as well as other threats such as flooding, feral predators, pesticide use and their small population size. With their ground-nesting habits, poor flying ability, and the tendency to run rather than fly from predators, the birds become easy prey for the fox. Now listed as a critically endangered species the bird makes a haunting return, a form of speculative reappearance as Ferran puts it, to a place in which it was once common – that of Wiradjuri country, near Narrandera NSW.
These beautiful, conceptual, improvised photographs are not only about the here and now, but are about present and past (a longing for a quixotic past?), about presence and absence… and about death and loss. Every thing contemporary photography is good at – that is, unpicking the threads of history and reassembling them – is here grounded “in the flatness of the landscape, the vastness of the sky and the colours of the lengths of felt the performer is manipulating.” In other words, grounded in light, colour and the red soil of the Australian landscape these re-imagined birds are captured in a fantastical performance / sublime dance (of death).
I love these photographs. They possess a sublime mystery that makes me stop and question how little the human race has learnt and how much we have lost. With species extinction, climate change and ocean pollution ongoing, this is only the beginning of the desecration of Mother Earth.
Omnia mutantur nos et mutamur in illis (all things change, and we change with them).
In Birdlike I aimed to summon the return of a small ground-dwelling bird, the Plains wanderer, Pedionomus torquatus, to a place that it vanished from long ago. Once common over vast areas of southern NSW and Victoria, its existence is now threatened, and birdwatchers like me will go to great lengths to see it just once in their lives. In these photographs, made on Wiradjuri country, near Narrandera NSW, the Plains wanderer makes a form of speculative reappearance, via signs as indirect as the flatness of the landscape, the vastness of the sky and the colours of the lengths of felt the performer is manipulating.
I came to this way of working a few years ago. Its two key components are my collaboration with a performer – here it is Kirsten Packham – and her improvisations with lengths of dyed and painted felt. I choose the performer carefully, as so much depends on her sensitivity to her surroundings and her ability to transmit it through her physical body. With its inherent density, softness and weight, the felt can amplify and enhance her movements and gestures, while exerting a strong presence of its own. I never know what will emerge from these sessions, only that it will be something new, arising out of that moment, that performance and that situation.
Until now I have preferred to work in the familiar environment of a photographic studio. Decamping to the landscape introduced many small and some not-so-small considerations: the texture of the ground underfoot, the ever-changing effects of early morning or late afternoon light, whether it was hot, cold or blowing a gale at any one moment. Small trees crept into the frame and started acting like performers themselves. As the photographs began to accumulate, I thought I could see an out-of-place, almost alien quality emerging. This was unexpected, but on reflection it seems consistent with the displacements that have already happened in this place, as well as with those others that may come in the future.
~ Anne Ferran, 2022
Each image is available in two sizes: 65 x 50cm Ed. of 5 + 2APs and 144 x 104cm Ed. of 3 + 2APs
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled
2021
From the series Resonance
In 2021, I celebrate 30 years of art practice with the creation of a new website, the first to contain all my bodies of work since 1991 (note: more bodies of work still have to be added between 1996-1999).
My first solo exhibition was in a hair dressing salon in High Street, Prahran, Melbourne in 1991, during my second year of a Bachelor of Arts (Fine Art Photography) at RMIT University (formerly Phillip Institute out in Bundoora). Titled Of Magic, Music and Myth it featured black and white medium format photographs of the derelict Regent Theatre and the old Victorian Railway’s Newport Workshops.
The concerns that I had at the time in my art making have remained with me to this day: that is, an investigation into the boundaries between identity, space and environment. Music and “spirit” have always been an abiding influence – the intrinsic music of the world and the spirit of objects, nature, people and the cosmos … in a continuing exploration of spaces and places, using found images and digital and film cameras to record glances, meditations and movement through different environments.
30 years after I started I hope I have learnt a lot about image making … and a lot about myself. I also hope the early bodies of my work are still as valid now as they were when I made them. In the 30 years since I became an artist my concerns have remained constant but as well, my sense of exploration and joy at being creative remains undimmed and an abiding passion.
Now, with ego integrated and the marching of the years I just make art for myself, yes, but the best reason to make art is … for love and for the cosmos. For I believe any energy that we give out to the great beyond is recognised by spirit. Success is fleeting but making art gives energy to creation. We all return to the great beyond, eventually.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
. Each photograph in this posting links to a different body of work on my new website. Please click on the photographs to see the work.
Unknown photographer
Opening of Marcus Bunyan’s exhibition The Naked Man Fears No Pickpockets at The Photographers’ Gallery and Workshop, Melbourne, 1993 showing at left (behind the crowd) the photograph Richmond Steps 1993
1993
Polaroid
Ian Lobb (Australian, b. 1948) Marcus 31/8/92 Taken by Ian Lobb at Phillip [Institute]
1992
Polaroid
Jeff Whitehead (Australian) Marcus in his Fred Perry and Doc Martens with his Mamiya RZ67 on tripod with Pelican case on Jeff’s car, Studley Park, Melbourne
1991-1992
Colour photograph
The only photograph of me with my camera 30 years ago!
Resonancenoun: the power to bring images, feelings, etc. into the mind of the person reading or listening; the images, etc. produced in this way…
A body of work for 2021. Very proud of this sequence…
Taken in heavy overcast conditions with slight rain after a thunderstorm had passed through on my Mamiya RZ67 medium format film camera, at Eagle’s Nest, Bunurong Marine and Coastal Park, Victoria, Australia.
A period of intense seeing and previsualisation.
No cropping, all full frame photographs. The colours are as the camera saw them.
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a digital colour 16″ x 20″ print costs $1,000 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see the Store web page.
Exhibition dates: 5th February – 27th February 2021
Photography & Curation/Art Direction – Tom Goldner Moving Image – Angus Scott Sound – Sean Kenihan Poetry – Dr Judith Crispin (publication) Colourist – CJ Dobson (moving image) Audio Visual – Toto Creative Cover Art – Katherina Rodrigues (publication)
Tom Goldner (Australian, b. 1984) Untitled from the series Do Brumbies Dream In Red?
2020
Strange Beauty
Bloated prostrate tentacles
wither into our idea of dying
overlapping human, shit
feeding foulest vegetables,
regenerating sourly
Kingdoms of foulest water
regorging sourly
Bloated brumbies, winged coal
rejigs
Strange Beauty
Floating in our mind
In grey greasy horror water
Full of surprises –
like a holocaust holding pond
At your peril
Skull twisted,
Served on corrugated soot
Land, once precious
disguised, drained
black, gold – split
burnt to reburn
charred brumbies, flying coal
rem/embers,
Millions of worst worst
Strange Beauty
lost as sources
Boiling, bubbling – like a holocaust
At your peril
Belching wishes to reassemble
Hexing new forms
Bottom of our nightmare
Bottom of our innings
Animals worst worst
Plants unredeemable
Satan not lucifer
Sky a trap
Wings a trap
Escape a trap
Strange Beauty
beside the dead and ugly
like a holocaust
Do you want to …
(At your peril)
… Remember ?
.
Marcus Bunyan and Ian Lobb, May 2021
Contested Ground
I saw this darkly mysterious, immersive exhibition by the artist Tom Goldner just after Melbourne suffered its mini-five day COVID lock down in February 2021, but I have been awaiting the installation photographs and video of the event to publish this posting.
This stimulating exhibition, with its wonderfully atmospheric sound track, was an overlapping animation of conceptual, documentary photographs that appear in Goldner’s book Do Brumbies Dream in Red? – and placed “the audience within the Snowy Mountains and Victorian Alpine regions during the period of 2019-2020 referred to as the Black Summer“, the project (both multimedia exhibition and book) considering “the systems which position the Snowy Mountain brumby and the catastrophic 2019-2020 Australian bushfires within a time of ecological uncertainty.” The starting point into Goldner’s investigation was that of the Snowy Mountain brumby, an Australian feral wild-roaming horse, an invasive, non-native species introduced during colonisation. The brumbies cannot see in red, and the artist wondered how the world must have appeared to them illuminated by the strange light of the raging bushfires. He uses this idea as a metonym throughout the project which acts as an entry point into both the human and nonhuman world, to begin to understand the human perception of this catastrophic event and the anthropogenic changes that are happening in the Australian landscape.
The research which underpins Goldner’s project is guided “by the work of English professor Timothy Morton and his theories on ‘ecological awareness’ in Dark Ecology (2016), which examine the intersection of places, scales and nonhuman interrelations. Running parallel to these ideas are those of American professor Donna Haraway’s most recent book, Staying with the Trouble (2016). Particularly her concept of the ‘Chthulucene’ that strives to capture a future in which all things in the world are connected, coexist and, in many cases, ‘collaborate’, and through this, we learn to ‘live and die well together’ and achieve a kind of ‘ongoingness’.” The artist seeks to flatten the hierarchy between human and nonhuman life by allowing us to recognise ourselves within the violence we inflict on the natural world during this human-assisted ecological disaster.
.
While the project professes to challenge the notion of clear and tidy boundaries in a time of ecological uncertainty, in reality it offers a particularly one-eyed perspective on the subject of anthropogenic changes to the landscape. I don’t mind this perspective at all, in fact I applaud it, for the ultimate goal of the photographs is to open our eyes to the destruction that human actions are inflicting on our environment. Through beautifully modulated photographs of great sensitivity Goldner pictures these spaces of destruction and re/generation. But is there ever an “original” landscape to which we must return?
In humans, a reduced sensitivity to red light due to missing or defective L-cones (or long wave cones) is known as protanopia or protanomaly. The derivation of the word protanopia is from the early 20th century: from proto- ‘original’ (red being regarded as the first component of colour vision) + an- ‘lacking’ + ‘opia’- (denoting a visual disorder). Protanomaly makes red look more green and less bright while protanopia makes you unable to tell the difference between red and green at all. People with protanopia are more likely to confuse black with many shades of red; dark brown with dark green, dark orange and dark red; some blues with some reds, purples and dark pinks; and mid-greens with some oranges (see image below).
When the first component of colour vision (red) is lacking we have a visual disorder. How, then, can we see the intersection of the human and non-human world clearly if we have a visual disorder? To what are we to return, to an untouched paradisiacal landscape pre-colonisation, pre-human inhabitation – to an “original” we can no longer see – or do we acknowledge the paradoxical “nature” of our contemporary existence on this earth in a more balanced way. Nothing is ever black and white, or in this case colour(–).1
For many generations humans have lived in the Snowy Mountains and Victorian Alpine regions, singing pastorals to the gods, seeking guidance to live on the land: the mountain ranges are thought to have had Aboriginal occupation for 20,000 years and after the areas were first explored by Europeans from the 1830s-1850s, high country stockmen followed using the mountains for grazing during the summer months (Wikipedia). Over the last few years, people of Victoria’s high country and animal lovers have rallied against the proposed culling of feral brumbies in the state’s national parks. They cite that brumbies hold “heritage value, they are part of our cultural and social history. Brumbies have lived in our Heritage National Parks for two centuries; are descendants of remounts that were sent to War with our soldiers… Brumbies were immortalised by Banjo Patterson, feature in paintings by Sydney Nolan and written about in the Silvery Brumby novels by Ellyne Mitchell. Brumbies are part of the fabric of our Australian society. It is undeniable that extremist elements must not be allowed to dictate on cultural and social values.”2 Goldner states that, “Brumbies are a symbol of national consciousness. While they may be labelled as a ‘feral species’ and a threat to native ecosystems by environmentalists, they are also valued as an important part of Australia’s history as a symbol of national spirit.”
Contested ground indeed, and perhaps one that needed to be more fully investigated in Goldner’s project.
While the second sentence in the above paragraph is true I would argue that the opposite of the first sentence is at least possible – that brumbies are an anti-symbol of national consciousness, for the animals hardly ever impinge on the collective consciousness of most Australians when they think about the Australian landscape. How often would the vast bulk of the city-dwelling Australian population think about the brumby as a symbol of national consciousness? Hardly ever would be my answer. It is not an original thought about the landscape that they would have.
.
Walking through the darkened spaces of the exhibition, I let the phenomena of superb images and sounds wash over me. The experience was particularly moving given the strange beauty of the limited colour palette images and the atmospheric vibrations of the music. For me, the key image of the exhibition was not that of the bloated brumby lying prostrate on the blackened earth, but that of an isolated grave standing erect in the scorched landscape. With no context to allow the viewer to anchor this grave to a historical past, all we are left with are questions and metaphors. What is this grave doing seemingly in the middle of nowhere? Who is the person buried there? The metaphors are rich indeed: the erect whiteness of the white man’s grave stone isolated against the black ness of the landscape, a landscape not their own, and perhaps not of their own making. The anonymous writing on the grave stone standing as a metaphor for any human who has ever lived. The iron fence that segregates the human from the land even as they buried in it… as though they are a part of this earth but apart from it. A masterful image if ever I saw one.
In the overlapping, interstitial, spatio-temporal dimensions of the gallery I placed myself into the existence of these works, into their networks of existence. As the artist wanted, I recognised “the violence we inflict on the natural world during this human-assisted ecological disaster” but not, I insist, through the flattening of the hierarchy between human and nonhuman life but through it’s very opposite – through an acknowledgement of the multiple, fragmented, lexias of existence,2 networks that live in multiple levels of intersectionality, like a spiders web created in the dimensions of extended space. Into this geometry of space, into the spatio-temporal ‘nature’ of photography – death, power, transcendence, timelines, delay, exposure, territorialisations, assemblage, bricolage, rhizomic structures and the author – “seeing is no longer framed or presupposed through relations of distance or perspective. Rather, the eye and the visible are embodied as they struggle with positionality, in the physical, mental, and emotional conflicts that result when you have to take responsibility for what you see, instead of conferring that responsibility on an-other.”4
Goldner’s vision embodies this ongoing thickness, this ongoing responsibility.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Footnotes
1/ “Conceptually, wholes are divided up or taken apart, dis-integrated into component pieces. They may be reintegrated, but in a way that reflects the understanding of those pieces at the time of their disassembly; the way the functions of individual parts of a whole are seen depends on the way the whole is divided into parts. Different visions result in different views of the whole.” Wolf, Mark. Abstracting Reality: Art, Communication, and Cognition in the Digital Age. Lanham: University Press of America, 2000, p. 196.
2/ Anonymous author. “Melbourne rally “Stop the bullets”,” media release on the Australian Brumby Alliance website May 1, 2021 [Online] Cited 09/05/2021.
3/ Lexia is perhaps the most widely applicable term for describing the linked pieces of information within a hypertext, referred to in various contexts as nodes, pages, frames and workspaces.
4/ Burnett, Ron. Cultures of Vision: Images, Media, & the Imaginary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995, pp. 137-138.
.
Many thankx to Tom Goldner for allowing me to publish the photographs and video in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. The Do Brumbies Dream in Red? – Photo Book is available from Tom Goldner’s website.
Protanopia vision
Photography & Curation/Art Direction – Tom Goldner Moving Image – Angus Scott
Photography & Curation/Art Direction – Tom Goldner Moving Image – Angus Scott
“A large portion of the project was made in the Snowy Mountain region of New South Wales.
During the first tip to the fire grounds in early January 2020 we came across a wild horse… It had died of a lung bleed while trying to escape the bushfires. I used the brumby as an entry point into Australia’s colonial history, proposing that the brumby is a manifestation of our collective actions.
I later learn that horses only see in blues and greens, and I wondered how the world must have appeared to them illuminated by that strange red light.
The project asks, can we too see the world differently?”
.
Tom Goldner on the Blackriver website [Online] Cited 05/04/2021
Do Brumbies Dream in Red? is a research-driven project which explores anthropogenic changes in the Australian landscape through the use of conceptual documentary photography. Presented as an immersive experience this collaborative project utilises large-scale projection to place the audience within the Snowy Mountains and Victorian Alpine regions during the period of 2019-2020 referred to as the Black Summer.
Do Brumbies Dream in Red? negotiates the human perception of this catastrophic event. This exhibition and publication reveals the bushfires and resulting damage through the eyes of another human-assisted ecological disaster, one of an invasive species: the Snowy Mountain Brumby.
The project considers the systems which position the Snowy Mountain brumby and the catastrophic 2019-2020 Australian bushfires within a time of ecological uncertainty. The Snowy Mountain brumby, an Australian feral wild-roaming horse, appears as a metonym throughout the project and acts as an entry point into both the human and nonhuman world.
Installation views of the exhibition Do Brumbies Dream In Red? – Tom Goldner 2021 at the Meat Market Stables, Melbourne
“Mixed-up times are overflowing with both pain and joy – with vastly unjust patterns of pain and joy, with unnecessary killing of ongoingness but also with necessary resurgence. The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present. Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.”
.
Donna Haraway, 2016
Do Brumbies Dream in Red? is a project driven by research which explores anthropogenic changes in the Australian landscape through the use of conceptual documentary photography, video and audio recordings.
The project considers the systems which position the Snowy Mountain brumby and the catastrophic 2019-2020 Australian bushfires within a time of ecological uncertainty. The Snowy Mountain brumby, an Australian feral wild-roaming horse, appears as a metonym throughout the project and acts as an entry point into both the human and nonhuman world.
Brumbies are a symbol of national consciousness. While they may be labelled as a ‘feral species’ and a threat to native ecosystems by environmentalists, they are also valued as an important part of Australia’s history as a symbol of national spirit. Brumbies represent wildness and the way we relate to, and attempt to control, nature.
The project challenges the notion of clear and tidy boundaries in a time of ecological uncertainty. The research is underpinned by the work of English professor Timothy Morton and his theories on ‘ecological awareness’ in Dark Ecology (2016), which examine the intersection of places, scales and nonhuman interrelations. Running parallel to these ideas are those of American professor Donna Haraway’s most recent book, Staying with the Trouble (2016). Particularly her concept of the ‘Chthulucene’ that strives to capture a future in which all things in the world are connected, coexist and, in many cases, ‘collaborate’, and through this, we learn to ‘live and die well together’ and achieve a kind of ‘ongoingness’.
Do Brumbies Dream in Red? seeks to flatten the hierarchy between human and nonhuman life by allowing us to recognise ourselves within the violence we inflict on the natural world. The visual outcomes that navigate these ideas are intertwined and are driven by a series of photographs, moving images and audio recordings. The project culminates in a photobook with an accompanying poem by Australian artist and academic Dr Judith Nangala Crispin. The publication was produced to be presented alongside a mixed-media exhibition, comprising of large-format projected still and moving imagery and a soundscape.
Text from the Tom Goldner website [Online] Cited 05/04/2021
Tom Goldner (Australian, b. 1984) Untitled from the series Do Brumbies Dream In Red?
2020
Tom Goldner (Australian, b. 1984) Untitled from the series Do Brumbies Dream In Red?
2020
Tom Goldner (Australian, b. 1984) Untitled from the series Do Brumbies Dream In Red?
2020
Tom Goldner (Australian, b. 1984) Untitled from the series Do Brumbies Dream In Red?
2020
Tom Goldner (Australian, b. 1984) Untitled from the series Do Brumbies Dream In Red?
2020
Tom Goldner (Australian, b. 1984) Untitled from the series Do Brumbies Dream In Red?
2020
Tom Goldner (Australian, b. 1984) Untitled from the series Do Brumbies Dream In Red?
2020
Tom Goldner (Australian, b. 1984) Untitled from the series Do Brumbies Dream In Red?
2020
Tom Goldner (Australian, b. 1984) Untitled from the series Do Brumbies Dream In Red?
2020
Tom Goldner (Australian, b. 1984) Untitled from the series Do Brumbies Dream In Red?
2020
Tom Goldner (Australian, b. 1984) Untitled from the series Do Brumbies Dream In Red?
2020
Tom Goldner (Australian, b. 1984) Untitled from the series Do Brumbies Dream In Red?
2020
Tom Goldner (Australian, b. 1984) Untitled from the series Do Brumbies Dream In Red?
2020
Tom Goldner (Australian, b. 1984) Untitled from the series Do Brumbies Dream In Red?
2020
Tom Goldner (Australian, b. 1984) Untitled from the series Do Brumbies Dream In Red?
2020
Tom Goldner (Australian, b. 1984) Untitled from the series Do Brumbies Dream In Red?
2020
Tom Goldner (Australian, b. 1984) Untitled from the series Do Brumbies Dream In Red?
2020
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Ma mère
1994
Gelatin silver print
Earlier in my life I believed that identity was always fluid, always in flux. These photographs reflect that belief.
Now as I get older, this belief has changed.
Identity is always steady – at a certain level – and that the old adage to know ones-self is still the greatest challenge. And that this knowledge brings a core that is consistent.
The fluidity of self-knowledge disappears when attention is sharpened.
.
Marcus Bunyan 2021
I am scanning my negatives made during the years 1991-1997 to preserve them in the form of an online archive as a process of active memory, so that the images are not lost forever. These photographs were images of my life and imagination at the time of their making, the ideas I was thinking about and the people and things that surrounded me.
*PLEASE NOTE THIS POSTING CONTAINS ART PHOTOGRAPHS OF MALE NUDITY – IF YOU DO NOT LIKE PLEASE DO NOT LOOK, FAIR WARNING HAS BEEN GIVEN*
Photographs are available from this series for purchase. As a guide, a vintage 8″ x 10″ silver gelatin print costs $700 plus tracked and insured shipping. For more information please see my Store web page.
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled (Rembrandt thinking)
1996
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) The conversation
1996
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled (Pope folded)
1996
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled (Pope unfolded)
1996
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) The Angelus, New R, 1892
1996
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Thy Kingdom Come
1996
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Purity
1996
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Whistler’s mother (looking out to sea)
1996
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Holbein’s Happiness
1996
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled (Sweet heart with leaves)
1996
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Windows at 63aa
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Urban abstraction (for Max)
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Between the breath and the silence
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Shame Fraser
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Port Melbourne to Port of Melbourne
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Out back
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled (pear on black)
1994
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Pear I
1994
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Pear II
1994
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Abstract I
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Abstract II
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Nude in sunlight
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Abstract III
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Abstract IIII
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Abstract V
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Abstract VI
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Question mark
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Four lines and two trestles
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Four tyres
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled (two cracks)
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled (plank)
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled (creature)
1996
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled (creature)
1996
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled (creature)
1996
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled (creature)
1996
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled (creatures)
1996
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled (creatures)
1996
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Roundel I
1996
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Roundel II
1996
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Roundel III
1996
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Roundel IIII
1996
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) The structure and fabric of existence 1
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Passionfruit²
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Passionfruit²
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) The structure and fabric of existence 2
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Williamstown 1 1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Williamstown 2 1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Williamstown 3 1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Case Tractor – 1925 –
1996
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Fordson Tractor 1922
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Hart Parr
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) John Deere Tractor c. 1925
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Lanz Bulldog Tractor 1930
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) McCormick Deering Tractor c. 1928
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Fighter 1
1994-96
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Fighter 2
1994-96
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) “Boomerang Way” Tocumwal Wishing Well
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) “Boomerang Way” Tocumwal Wishing Well
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) “Boomerang Way” Tocumwal Wishing Well
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Australian landscape
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Australian landscape
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Australian landscape
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) A twist of the mind
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) A twist of the mind
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) A twist of the mind
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Australian landscape
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Australian landscape
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Australian landscape
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Australian landscape
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Untitled
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Two men and a ute
1994-95
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Plume (X marks the spot)
1995
Gelatin silver print
Marcus Bunyan (Australian, b. 1958) Lumbe, Blacksmith, Undertaker
1995
Gelatin silver print
![Ian Lobb (Australian, b. 1948) 'Marcus 31/8/92 Taken by Ian Lobb at Phillip [Institute]' 1992](https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2021/11/ian-lobb-marcus-phillip-institute-1992.jpg)
