(Re) Presenting 2021 | Tidal Meditation (Turtle Swamp, Canaipa Island & Deanbilla Bay, Minjerribah)| Durational video art work by artist Paul Andrew | 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, the Brisbane School of Art with artist educator Irene Amos and life drawing classes with artist Mervyn Moriarty in his Enoggera Terrace artist studio in the 1977 and 1981 period its hard to believe it’s almost 43 years now that I have been interested in and involved with artist collectives, artist groups and community-based initiatives in Australia and overseas.
From March 2018 until November 2019 I had the pleasure to be involved for a short period with two local Canaipa artist collectives; ‘Canaipa Mudlines’ and ‘Tricia Dobson’s Weaving Circles’ . These two groups generously include local artists based in the Redlands who focus on and feature personal and collaborative creative responses to art and ecology, and encourage environmental protection awareness in the SMBI [Southern Moreton Bay Islands] region on Quandamooka country.
I have long been enthralled by the liminal space between land and sea in this place which connects me to my childhood while growing up in this part of Australia and during a recent series of site activated activities I made a lo-fi warts, sound glitches and all video art work ‘Field Notes – Walking Meditation’, is part of the ‘Tidal Meditations’ series of video and sound works I am now working on independently from my Whistling Kite Bird Hide Artist Studio on Canaipa Island.
This particular work was made, in part, 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 in Super 8 filmmaking using stop motion techniques where personal walking meditations are performed as a way to contemplate, to pause and to reflect on the impermanence of life. Being involved in these two groups for two years was largely a positive experience.
Today I am currently love love loving creative solitude in this beautiful region. My current and ongoing focus is setting up a new artist studios, working on the final stage of Project One of the ARI Remix [March 2011- March 2022] and undertaking a part-time doctoral research project at QUT Creative Industries. This practice-led research focuses on what the digital can bring to personal archives and to contemporary ARI archives.
About: Whistling Kite Bird Hide Artist Studios
Photo: Queer Walking Meditation 2019, Paul Andrew
I acknowledge the Quandamooka People as the traditional custodians of the lands in which we live, make and work where sovereignty was never ceded. I 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.