Night Sky Journey, 2001
Rocks, bull kelp
Variable dimensions
collection of the National Gallery of Victoria

Night Sky Journey is one artwork consisting of two elements- rocks and kelp. Their materials are as crucial as the timber which forms the work "Leeawuleena".

Rocks have always fascinated me, I first took this interest into further studies and completed an archaeology degree, but that wasn't what I was looking for and I found myself eventually making art.

When I see an outcrop or a single sharp-edged stone I become excited with thoughts of tools and their activities. When I see roadworks I stop because there is the promise of fresh sharp stones emerging into day for the first time, ready for me to use without damaging existing Aboriginal tools or quarry sites. A fresh slate within a history laden with material culture and heritage to rework and reconsider through art.

So, on a hill in the middle of 2001 on a highway in central Tasmania I stopped with some sacks and collected large lumps of fantastically sharp basalt-like rock thrown out of a hillside by dozers widening the road. I knew that they would become this work "Night sky journey". I wanted to make a rock-climbing-wall of pseudo artefacts, stone that had been reworked, newly edged, changed of surface to carry this story of new ways to carry culture into the future. A travelling story, a mapping of journey about time and inner space rather than a real locality. The embrace of the old within the new is what I was trying to consider within this work.

I saw that climbing was an important metaphor for travels from past into present and into future in all the works in the exhibition "Heartland" at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi in September 2001. Strings of shells ascend upwards, climbing ropes offer another escape, the twig like creatures of "Leeawuleena" move steadily up their timber escape route, even the cuttlefish tablets "Time Capsules" promise an escape from this world.

All the works were about Journeys with different materials to speak of time and transformation of objects into art and merging of history, myth, memory. The use of many raw natural elements in this exhibition- kelp, shell, string, wood, timber, rocks- was my way of reducing things to original ingredients, substance, matter from which we came and will return.

I took the rocks to the coast in North East Tasmania, Tebrikunna, and worked with the stones day after day. Reverberations, they sang as they hit each other and cast flakes across the sandy grass upon which I worked. Slowly this artwork took form. I saw individuals- big and small rocks emerge. I saw which way they would go on the wall, I saw that this would be a night sky, a constellation. As I lay there in the north by dark I looked up at the night sky and reflected about its changes through time, about how now a satellite punctuates my thoughts more often than a falling star did for my people in the past. I thought about how we were created from the stars, the Moinee creation story of our Palawa people, and in this way the work felt right for me to continue making. I also thought about tools and toolkits and how it was to use the materials of traditional culture to be my tools of storytelling today, and I liked the fluidity and continuity of that.

I wondered about what the Old People would think of my use of good stone to just be looked at rather than cutting, cleaning, scraping, hacking at trees to provide notches to climb after possums, or edging wooden sticks to make chisels for levering shell fish off rocks. What folly they would surely say ! I walked the sea shore by morning, I took limpets off rocks to eat and collected the right kelp to make the shoes. I made the shoes by the fire at night, where I then hung them filled with tea tree bark so they wouldn't shrink too much and dry malformed. These shoes are the story of my trying to find my way in the night and day of my mind, my inner self, today. Wanting to live up to myself, my ancestry, my potential, trying to respect the past and yet find my own way out of it into the unknown future. I feel that working by hand so intensively with plants, rocks, shells, kelp, wood has given me much more inner strength and understanding of my own people than any other work I have made. I am very glad something directed me to create this way at this time.