Building Babel 2018

One night in 2018, I woke up with the title ‘Building Babel’ in my mind. It seemed to express something of what I had experienced over recent years as I painted my way into and out of the Country of Gamay and its tributary waterways.

Babel is pride. Babel is hubris. Babel is blasphemy. You can see all that if you go to Wanda Beach and watch the new estates rising out of the sand hills. But of course this is just part of the process that has been going on ever since Cook and Phillip arrived at what they called Botany Bay.

 The works that comprise this exhibition travel through the natural and built environment that runs south and southwest from the bay. This journey does not follow a simple linear narrative along the compass points. Instead, images are reflected back and forth through time and space. When the places are seen in unfamiliar juxtapositions, they take on new resonance, allowing viewers to make unexpected connections.

The movement of water—both salt and fresh, and including ocean, bay, rivers, creeks, canals and stormwater drains—creates the spiritual as well as physical links through this Country. Water not only gave Gamay and its hinterland its topographic shape, but it also shapes the economy of the area and the lives and culture of the people who live in it.

In traditional time, waterways formed the boundaries of clan land. In colonial time, the Gumbramorra Swamp, draining into the Alexandra Canal, allowed the first industries to flourish. In the 21st century, the living landscape continues to reveal itself in the movement of water.

Building Babel was exhibited at Watters Gallery, Sydney, in 2018, as one of the last shows there before the gallery closed its doors.