not quite back to the real world

It’s been less than a fortnight since I left Bundanon, but already it’s feeling like a fairly pivotal turning point in my creative life.

Having moved fairly smoothly from school to university to the workplace, finding myself in jobs (journalism/newspaper editor) that offer plenty of challenges and require a substantial amount of attention from my mind, I’ve never really had the opportunity to spend any great stretch of time on creative projects.

Those that I have pursued have been, invariably, either spontaneous or reactive. My two novel length works-in progress both began life as short stories that simply got out of hand, taking on a life of their own. On the photography front, I’ve been very much of the verité school, shooting what I see, the world ‘as it is’ without my interference. I acknowledge, of course, the choices I make in subject selection, framing, composition and the like, but have rarely been active in setting up or directing a scene or an image. I’d figured this was a stylistic choice, a philosophical consideration of photography as documentation and momentary, but am now wondering whether it was simply a lack of time.

On the writing side, the hope entering the fortnight had been to finish a few projects, in any spare time that may have emerged around our main major ‘life between buildings’ project. Yet after two weeks these never even made it out of the suitcase – this was a place and a time for thinking afresh, for inventing/crafting not polishing; opening doors not closing them.

So instead of wrapping up existing projects, I seem to have started more than I can keep track of. Central is the life between buildings song cycle, to which I intend to co-contribute text along with Rhiannon and Danielle, and work on more visual ideas that will hopefully augment its final presentation.

‘The Last Supper’ is to be a 12-song song-cycle, co-created by the life between buildings team of Serena Armstrong, Danielle Carey, Rhiannon Cook, Julian Day, and, in there as well, me.

The cycle will build upon written texts exploring the last meals of condemned death row prisoners, combining the irresistible motifs of Food and Death.

The idea is to create a work that can stand alone in a traditional performative sense, incorporating visual elements , but there is also strong interest in looking at the ‘event’ possibilities the idea holds, to explore its potential in installation or even ‘happening’ terms, such as incorporating the work into an actual meal with audience interaction, a blurring of the active performer/ passive audience lines.

This idea developed throughout Bundanon and grew richer each day, particularly in the second week. We would share our thoughts and ideas for it, discussing its difficulties and problematic aspects as well as what intrigued us.

Once the idea had developed to a point where we could all see where it might be heading, we were each able to work on bringing our various strengths to it, working on potential texts and some basic musical possibilities.

Amidst all this, as I was being drawn further and further into the surrounds, I also found some windows to experiment with some visual ideas. With a fortnight to spend free of daily concerns (cooking and grooming matters notwithstanding), my early ideas for some photographic series developed, expanded and then shifted quite substantially. For reasons I expect I’ll explore at greater length down the line, I’ve developed a fascination bordering on obsession with red. Red in all its forms, but particularly red as a thread – in this case wool.

‘Threads’ are a theme I’ve begun to quietly follow, but the red is quite recent and appeared quite suddenly, almost violently. Apart from its symbolic elements, which I’ll discuss down the track, I’m quite taken by the difficulties cameras appear to have in processing reds of this intensity.

My early red interventions at Bundanon were quite rushed and quickly executed. I wasn’t sure if the idea even had any lasting worth, and hadn’t fully understood what it was I was trying to say. Spending more and more time wrapping objects, winding the wool around the man-made or natural items that drew me, that seemed to be asking for a red challenge, or echo, I found the time and space to think more about what it was I was trying to do, and say.

I had gone into Bundanon thinking I would look at spending more time on photo manipulation – working with layers to get my photos to look at the relationship between the ‘observed world’, text and music. But instead of post-production and scanning, layering disparate images for a common cause, I found I was more and more drawn towards creating these layers in real-time and real-space.


The poetics of the bush and its musicality was utterly enthralling. I couldn’t face sitting at my computer trying to recreate when here was a chance to create directly, to interact with the natural surroundings and enter into a type of direct dialogue.

Hence the paperbark/paperback project, the Byron rock, the Haydn gum, and variations on the ‘poe-tree’ project. Many more ideas have also been sifting through since my return, with the urge to create kicked along again after seeing Jeanette Winterson, a favourite author, speak at the Sydney Opera House to open the Sydney Writers’ Festival on Tuesday (more about that for another post).

While perhaps seemingly like a fairly haphazard hotchpotch of concepts and threads, each, in their way, has been spawned by the Bundanon and life between buildings collaboration. In the past I’ve tended to work fairly individually, drawing upon my own ideas and bouncing them up against, well, myself.

I think what I’ve taken from this experience is not just the amazing time I had working closely with such creative, inspiring artists (and good friends!), but I have learned how ideas bounced around can grow and develop and take on a life of their own, thanks to the enthusiasm and input of others.

So while we have a common cause in our central project, we all each have other strands to follow, other threads to explore, that each developed, to some extent out, of the collaborative process. The actual ‘practice’ part, the writing or the photography is, for me, still a fairly personal path. I tend to process ideas over a longer period than some, then quietly chip away at them, channelling through my work things I can’t always explain in discussion. I think my strength in working with others is more likely to be a piece of text or a photo that tells a story, rather than ‘discussed’ input as such – that may change, but my work seems to come from a part of me I don’t necessarily have access to in conversation form.

To spend two weeks immersed in this, in such a deeply inspiring place as Bundanon, has been an experience that will ripple through my life for some time.

This was an inspiring group of artists to spend time with, and I like to think we’ll be able to keep working together, even if loosely, under the life between buildings umbrella.

- Benjamin