Flow-motion
Flow-motion was created in collaboration with Niyanta Sharma for Layabout Magazine.
In Katherine the sun beats down relentlessly, licking the back of your neck and drenching you in salty sweat. During the wet season the heat is joined by an oppressive blanket of moisture that refuses to lift day or night. I like to imagine when the humidity breaks there is a collective sigh of relief, as though a curse has been broken.
Five hours is the length of time to fly from Melbourne to Darwin. Another three hour drive and you arrive in Katherine. Months of Melbourne’s winter had left my skin calcified and muscle braced. Though welcome, it was a shock to the body to suddenly be thrust into tropical heat and I experienced a type of climate induced jet-lag.
Niyanta and I borrow Tilly’s van and made the journey from Darwin, stopping along the way to idyllic hot springs and quite bush walks. We began to thaw. Each of those first few days, speeding along long flat expanses of red earth expanded out for small eternities. In conversation we would regularly loop back on ourselves, marvel at how a single day on the road could feel like a week back in the real world. How long it had been since we had last felt the sun on our skin. Proper and hot. That familiar intoxicant that brings you back into yourself.
We roasted okra over a sparse campfire and contemplated what our submission for the the upcoming issue of Layabout issue would be. The theme HARD, had many connotations and conjured a variety of ideas. Previously, we discussed ways we could combine Niyanta’s sculptural work and my photographic work but couldn’t decide on how to bridge the two.
The next morning we visited the Cutta Cutta cave system in Nitmiluk National Park where we learned the time it takes for stalactites and stalagmites to grow. Around 10mm a year, formed by the deposit of calcite crystals through minute drops of water seeping through the porous rock, solidifying into long columns, or into static curtains with flowing folds. These rock formations shimmer and flow like water, representing tens of thousands of years of growth.
A few weeks or a human lifetime are dwarfed by the immense span required for these geological features to grow. I left the darkness of the cave blinded by the high-noon sun, disoriented and feeling small and insignificant. For the remainder of the trip we spoke only a little about time. The sun rays had made their way to our centre and we had adjusted to the heat.
Back in Melbourne, inspired by our time in the cave, we recreated the process. Dipping strips of fabric in plaster of Paris, creating draping forms and liquid flows with the material. Plaster sets quickly leaving no time to think or adjust. Forced to move without hesitation. It was hurried and messy. A crude facsimile of what we had witnessed in the caves.
Overlaying images of the these sculptural iterations with images of the caves was a way of connecting these perceptions of time. From the immediate to infinitively long. It was a fitting attempt make sense of our week away and start a creative conversation between Niyanta and I.
This work is a digital collage of plaster and fabric sculptural pieces combined and overlayed with images of Cutta Cutta cave systems in Nitmiluk, Katherine.
Originally published in Layabout Magazine
https://nt.gov.au/parks/find-a-park/cutta-cutta-caves-nature-park