Exhibitions
Glass House Mountains
Louise Martin-Chew
As I begin this essay, the light rain which has fallen off and on for days intensifies into a heavy prolonged downpour. As the water starts to rush down the gully, and gush wide over the spillway of our dam, the gentle sound from outside deepens into a dull roar. As anyone who has spent any amount of time in the Australian bush would be aware, there is nothing quiet about nature. The noise level even without rain can be astonishing—the drone of the cicadas in the middle of the day, the dissonant bird sounds at dawn and dusk, and during rainfall, the timbre and volume of sound that can emerge from a group of native frogs is truly awesome. And then there is the wind in the trees, the groan of the trunks, different leaf music—a random rush of sound and then the quiet. It has an undulating quality, the roar and then the quiet, not very different to distant traffic.
Before moving into a bush landscape I lived on Petrie Terrace, above one of Brisbane's busiest intersections. While the bush noise levels are gentler and more undulating, at times they are louder than in the city – the heckling and arguing of kookaburras instead of passers-by, the harsh call of the koala in lieu of the hooters of Suncorp Stadium, wind in the trees instead of the surge of the traffic. It is this natural/industrial quality drawn out of recordings in the field that rings uncannily true in Liza Lim's soundtrack for her Glass House Mountains installation with Judy Watson. Its conceptual basis lies in the pairing of the natural and the manmade, the Indigenous and the Introduced. These strands have become an effective tag team, dovetailing and overlaying, one then the other, entwined in an endless continuum that says much about our place in the world.
The Glass House Mountains are a series of ancient eroded volcanoes located in the hinterland north of Brisbane. They are a strong image in the consciousness of people in and around Brisbane and the genesis of this project is in Watson and Lim's individual experiences of these mountains.
Watson, like others who grew up in Queensland, remembers the drama in the drive from Brisbane to the north coast on the old Bruce Highway. A turn in the road and the looming, ominous presence of Tibrogargan rising up was a highlight of the trip north. Lim, flying into Brisbane ten years ago, was struck by the aerial view of the mountains' bell-like shapes which emerge from the surrounding flat farmland.
When Watson, a contemporary artist and an Indigenous woman whose matrilineal family is from north west Queensland, and Lim, a composer, came together to make this work based on the Glass House Mountains, they adopted the methodology with which Judy has approached all of her work. As Hetti Perkins has noted, 'Judy Watson paints the country not from outside it but from within.' Likewise Lim's idea of making recordings specific to sites on selected mountains and in the local area has allowed their patterns to be quite literally marked and transcribed into an expression of elemental forces.
Both Lim and Watson have started with observations, measuring and mapping with tape recorder and video. While countless artists have taken these mountains as their muse since Captain Cook named them in 1770, Lim and Watson have acknowledged the complexity of Aboriginal ownership and legend, as well as European cartography and the journeys of the early explorers.
Lim's site recordings have been filtered, amplified, multiplied and digitally reworked in the studio. Nothing was added, maintaining the continuum between the natural world and the traces of human presence left in this landscape. Watson's videos, which utilise Lim's field recordings as soundtracks, attach a narrative to this raw material. There is a parallel with the early 'European gaze' at these mountains as she retraces Cook's and later Matthew Flinders's journey by boat to the mountains from Pumicestone Passage. Seen from the shore, Beerwah, Tibrogargan and Crookneck are shrouded in mist, emphasizing both their resonant presence and spiritual significance.
Liza Lim's soundtracks are integral in each exhibition space. The pineapple field is a contextual indicator for the mountains and is coupled with Lim's composition Crookneck, derived from the heckling of kookaburras at dawn. A scratchy breath sounds out amidst drumming like an irregular heartbeat. This sound emanates from the earth itself, rising to an almost painful peak every ninety minutes. Surveyors' markers, known as boning rods, are spear-like, suspended, symbolizing the measuring up of the lands into new introduced boundaries.
Beerwah, the largest and 'mother mountain' in Aboriginal legend, has been recast in shimmering taffeta, the craggy impermeability of the pregnant shape of the rock replaced with translucent softness. It is an intimate and gentle view of the mother mountain—a birthing site for the local Indigenous people. Watson's accompanying video records with a caress the stone axe grinding grooves along a creek, dancing insects in a pond made from the pod-shaped indentation in the rock, and the rushing streams which acknowledge the tears of Beerwah's son Coonowrin, rejected by his father Tibrogargan in Aboriginal legend. The soundtrack, Lim's recordings from the same sites, fleshes out our experience with the lapping of water, the hum of cicadas, and the reverberation, repeated in the sonorous 'cello' sounding in the space, of a mountain that rings like a bell.
Lim's composition, Beerwah for Cello and Electronics, is a transcription of a surveyor's contour map, an abstraction dictated by primary form. The music translates the spatial into emotional relationships, dividing up time as a journey across shifting lines.
Watson's canvases of ten of these mountains transform the topography of each site in different shades of red ochre. Displayed on the floor in the Indigenous ground painting tradition, they echo the European geological description in their contours while their colours acknowledge the blood stains of history and the red volcanic earth of the mountains. In Lim's accompanying track, Tibrogargan, the dark descends like a subterranean vibration, with an intermittent butcher-bird call, rendered hyper real, signalling optimism, or perhaps resilience against the odds.
In these works, Watson and Lim have built observation into an individual artistic response to the monumentality of these sites. The holistic nature of the visual/aural experience places emotional markers over the residue of lives lived here. The mountains morph from 'silent sentinels' to an imaginative and artistic country vibrating with memory, resonant with listening presences.