Finalist, 2012 Sunshine Coast Art Prize, Caloundra Regional Gallery, Queensland, August 2012
David Edgar announced as the winner of the 2012 Corangamarah Art Prize at the opening ceremony on 7 July 2012 at Otway Estate Winery and Brewery, Colac-Lavers Hill Road, Banongarook. The acquisitive prize worth $5,000 is awarded to a two dimensional artwork in any medium, which has been inspired by a happening or experience from the year preceding – a conceit.
In making her announcement, judge Robyn Burgess said that she was looking for technical excellence as well as interesting, original and intriguing subject matter. She felt Inner / Outer 3 had interesting ideas and was very well executed and presented.
David's artist statement on his entry said. "Each year I spend some time on a small island to escape every-day life and find myself again. When on the island I imagine myself out at sea looking back in on myself, the waves, fog, cliffs and the vastness that imprisons me and I slowly start to awaken again."
Inner Outer, 130 cm x 110 cm, charcoal and pastel on paper (2012 Corangamarah Art Prize Winner)
In making her announcement, judge Robyn Burgess said that she was looking for technical excellence as well as interesting, original and intriguing subject matter. She felt Inner / Outer 3 had interesting ideas and was very well executed and presented.
David's artist statement on his entry said. "Each year I spend some time on a small island to escape every-day life and find myself again. When on the island I imagine myself out at sea looking back in on myself, the waves, fog, cliffs and the vastness that imprisons me and I slowly start to awaken again."
Inner Outer, 130 cm x 110 cm, charcoal and pastel on paper (2012 Corangamarah Art Prize Winner)
In June 2012 I received an Australia Council for the Arts grant through its ArtStart program to develop aspects of my practice including getting this website up and running.
So to all of those people, particularly Jamin, Annette, Noel Frankham, Allanah Dopson, Denise Robinson and the Australia Council who assisted me with getting this grant, I say a massive massive thank you. Now to make it happen...
So to all of those people, particularly Jamin, Annette, Noel Frankham, Allanah Dopson, Denise Robinson and the Australia Council who assisted me with getting this grant, I say a massive massive thank you. Now to make it happen...
Finalist, Bay of Fires Art Prize, St Helens, May 2012
Day 10 (Saturday 14 April 2012)
8.29pm - (Back in Hobart) I set my alarm for 6.10am to go and have a look at the sunrise. I woke up at about 5.40am and looked outside, the orange/red glow had just begun deep on the horizon. So I got up. It also helped that I needed to relieve myself as well as the sounds of Karl rattling around next door. I put some clothes on, wondered off down Col’s brush-cutted super highway to the eastern part of the island.
It was a great way to finish the trip, watching the crimson red sky, with all manner of soft purples mixed in and the wind blowing at my back as I nestled myself on the hard uneven rock positioned on top of an edge of cliff face for my first proper look at a sunrise on this trip. The lighthouse continued to glow but the power of the sun was dwarfing its strength. For the next hour and half I watched the sun slowly rise, feeling the wind continuing to drive itself across the island, over me, and then out to sea. The orange turned to golden yellow as the first rays of the sun appeared, the nearby cliffs reflecting the light and radiating with the intense colour. I had many thoughts but one of the key ones was about Tom Hay who died of cancer a few years ago in his mid twenties. Why I was thinking of him I’m not sure, but I thought of a quote that I wrote about in my MFA exegesis about when one looks out over the past expanse, (or over to an horizon) and that when they do this they think about moving back through places in time within their own thoughts.
The horizon is so far away from my vantage point as I am so far up, the scene is vast and expansive, the cliffs drop dramatically, the sea cannot be heard but can be seen the height I’m at the sound of the wind drown it sounds out. I think of Tim and his fishing trip that I had to pull out of. I wander if they are going around Tasman. (And yes sure enough his images posted on Facebook later in the day have the island in the background). The time flies as I sit here up on this spectacular vantage point. Col turns up after 15 minutes but keeps wandering past. After the sunset has reached it conclusion I head back to Q2, pack up, do the breakfast ritual, help packing and cleaning of Q3 then we wait for arrival of the helicopter. It arrives a little late, but we all hear it coming in the distance. I make some notes about its arrival at the time:
Our lifeline drifts in, does a few laps around us in a roar of marvellous engineering ingenuity. The blades are whizzing around at incredible speed and volume. It arrives with the first signs of outside tension, as it appears that the pilot has been given no notice that we are on the island, let alone needing evacuation with over 800kg of gear and rubbish. Civilization returns. The Yellow-tailed Black-cockatoos don’t like the arrival of this big noisy flying beast and take off down to the north end of the island. Here is the beginning of the end of my 10 days on Tasman. But we continue to wait for the chopper to return and take us off, so we take advantage of the AMSA rep arrival and take a quick trip up the many steps of the lighthouse for a view of the top of the island from its veranda. Just prior to walking out onto the veranda I overhear Karl talking into his video camera describing the layout of the small space where the base of the old kerosene light used to stand, now pretty much a vacant space, ‘with the soul ripped out of it’, he says. The BOM reps arrive and we are out on the next flight.
Eventually, I’m back at Safety Cove just after 10am, packed into a car after 11, and back in Hobart after a long drive stopping at Eaglehawk Neck for coffee and Cambridge to swap over a set of keys. I’m home by 1.30pm; it’s a nice but very strange feeling. Tonight there will be no more rickety bed, no more blow flies, no more getting up in the middle of the night to wee on the lawn on the southern side of Q2 whilst looking at the silvery light of the sky, Q3 and the lighthouse doing its regular rotation. No more regularity of having to be at Q3 for breakfast by 7.45.
The afternoon feels like I was never at Tasman. The time has gone, but the memories are still fresh, it seems to have been 10 days that have flown by. I’m tired from the early start. I need to re-read this, look through the images and edit them, and come up with some sort of conclusion after thinking about it for a while.
In total, we undertook 315 hours of volunteer work done by 10 people over 10 days, a total of 31.5 hours each, or 3.15 hours per day. (From Mike’s report of the trip to PWS)
Aftermath
23 April – 3.05pm
I’ve now been off Tasman for 10 days. 'Ten days being back in civilisation' as I've called it to a few friends, laughed off by the mainlanders who think Hobart as being the furthest thing from civilisation, to which I somewhat agree, but in other ways am a little miffed by. Being on an island for ten days at a time is truly a magical experience. Every time I have returned I see things a little differently for a while. The island way of life takes over my being for some time after and affects me quite consciously. I like this and I don’t fight it.
Over the last week there has been two of my kids birthdays and a day of driving nearly 700 kilometres over the other side of Tasmania and back home again to look at a gallery for 20 minutes that I’ll be showing in at the end of next year. I’ve also started going through the 1,800+ images that I took whilst on the island and will slowly start to edit these into some sort of legible state. I’ve also read Peter Hill’s Stargazing, the book he wrote about his three brief experiences as a lighthouse keeper in Scotland in the early 1970’s. I felt the book was a bit of let down after being on Tasman, but there were certainly some bits that I could identify with. I still enjoyed the book though and here's a quote from it,
“The lighthouse and the island, in fact all lighthouses and their islands and rocks, are like unchanging stage-sets for a play. Sometimes it is a comedy, sometimes a drama, occasionally a tragedy – but the props remain the same.” P. 191
This quote is wonderful observations of island life. I think it relates well to my four extended trips to the island. The silence of this most recent trip; the tales from others of trekking across remote parts of Tasmania and other amazing places; people’s moods; and old stories of Tasman, etc. It all happens in the same place, with the same vistas and backdrops, and in the same quarters 3 over each days daily eating ritual. And this is what Human Geographers would call the essence of place, the ‘stage-sets’ plus the ‘play’ working together to make up that philosophical thing known as place.
On this trip my notes were made directly into this laptop whilst sitting up at the end of day, tired and exhausted from all of the walking and working. But there were moments when I would think of something and make note of it in my iphone, handy little beast it is.
From the 1,800+ images I’ve gone through I’m so far most intrigued by 90 or-so of mist/fog. In black and white they have quite a seductive quality and I’m hoping that they will come up well when using grey and black in a series of new drawings. The rocks have also turned out well. I’m still unsure about what to do with the interiors and the rubble, although the latter I will begin to look at images of war and battlefields and see where I can insert rubble. The future looks good...
Previous
8.29pm - (Back in Hobart) I set my alarm for 6.10am to go and have a look at the sunrise. I woke up at about 5.40am and looked outside, the orange/red glow had just begun deep on the horizon. So I got up. It also helped that I needed to relieve myself as well as the sounds of Karl rattling around next door. I put some clothes on, wondered off down Col’s brush-cutted super highway to the eastern part of the island.
It was a great way to finish the trip, watching the crimson red sky, with all manner of soft purples mixed in and the wind blowing at my back as I nestled myself on the hard uneven rock positioned on top of an edge of cliff face for my first proper look at a sunrise on this trip. The lighthouse continued to glow but the power of the sun was dwarfing its strength. For the next hour and half I watched the sun slowly rise, feeling the wind continuing to drive itself across the island, over me, and then out to sea. The orange turned to golden yellow as the first rays of the sun appeared, the nearby cliffs reflecting the light and radiating with the intense colour. I had many thoughts but one of the key ones was about Tom Hay who died of cancer a few years ago in his mid twenties. Why I was thinking of him I’m not sure, but I thought of a quote that I wrote about in my MFA exegesis about when one looks out over the past expanse, (or over to an horizon) and that when they do this they think about moving back through places in time within their own thoughts.
The horizon is so far away from my vantage point as I am so far up, the scene is vast and expansive, the cliffs drop dramatically, the sea cannot be heard but can be seen the height I’m at the sound of the wind drown it sounds out. I think of Tim and his fishing trip that I had to pull out of. I wander if they are going around Tasman. (And yes sure enough his images posted on Facebook later in the day have the island in the background). The time flies as I sit here up on this spectacular vantage point. Col turns up after 15 minutes but keeps wandering past. After the sunset has reached it conclusion I head back to Q2, pack up, do the breakfast ritual, help packing and cleaning of Q3 then we wait for arrival of the helicopter. It arrives a little late, but we all hear it coming in the distance. I make some notes about its arrival at the time:
Our lifeline drifts in, does a few laps around us in a roar of marvellous engineering ingenuity. The blades are whizzing around at incredible speed and volume. It arrives with the first signs of outside tension, as it appears that the pilot has been given no notice that we are on the island, let alone needing evacuation with over 800kg of gear and rubbish. Civilization returns. The Yellow-tailed Black-cockatoos don’t like the arrival of this big noisy flying beast and take off down to the north end of the island. Here is the beginning of the end of my 10 days on Tasman. But we continue to wait for the chopper to return and take us off, so we take advantage of the AMSA rep arrival and take a quick trip up the many steps of the lighthouse for a view of the top of the island from its veranda. Just prior to walking out onto the veranda I overhear Karl talking into his video camera describing the layout of the small space where the base of the old kerosene light used to stand, now pretty much a vacant space, ‘with the soul ripped out of it’, he says. The BOM reps arrive and we are out on the next flight.
Eventually, I’m back at Safety Cove just after 10am, packed into a car after 11, and back in Hobart after a long drive stopping at Eaglehawk Neck for coffee and Cambridge to swap over a set of keys. I’m home by 1.30pm; it’s a nice but very strange feeling. Tonight there will be no more rickety bed, no more blow flies, no more getting up in the middle of the night to wee on the lawn on the southern side of Q2 whilst looking at the silvery light of the sky, Q3 and the lighthouse doing its regular rotation. No more regularity of having to be at Q3 for breakfast by 7.45.
The afternoon feels like I was never at Tasman. The time has gone, but the memories are still fresh, it seems to have been 10 days that have flown by. I’m tired from the early start. I need to re-read this, look through the images and edit them, and come up with some sort of conclusion after thinking about it for a while.
In total, we undertook 315 hours of volunteer work done by 10 people over 10 days, a total of 31.5 hours each, or 3.15 hours per day. (From Mike’s report of the trip to PWS)
Aftermath
23 April – 3.05pm
I’ve now been off Tasman for 10 days. 'Ten days being back in civilisation' as I've called it to a few friends, laughed off by the mainlanders who think Hobart as being the furthest thing from civilisation, to which I somewhat agree, but in other ways am a little miffed by. Being on an island for ten days at a time is truly a magical experience. Every time I have returned I see things a little differently for a while. The island way of life takes over my being for some time after and affects me quite consciously. I like this and I don’t fight it.
Over the last week there has been two of my kids birthdays and a day of driving nearly 700 kilometres over the other side of Tasmania and back home again to look at a gallery for 20 minutes that I’ll be showing in at the end of next year. I’ve also started going through the 1,800+ images that I took whilst on the island and will slowly start to edit these into some sort of legible state. I’ve also read Peter Hill’s Stargazing, the book he wrote about his three brief experiences as a lighthouse keeper in Scotland in the early 1970’s. I felt the book was a bit of let down after being on Tasman, but there were certainly some bits that I could identify with. I still enjoyed the book though and here's a quote from it,
“The lighthouse and the island, in fact all lighthouses and their islands and rocks, are like unchanging stage-sets for a play. Sometimes it is a comedy, sometimes a drama, occasionally a tragedy – but the props remain the same.” P. 191
This quote is wonderful observations of island life. I think it relates well to my four extended trips to the island. The silence of this most recent trip; the tales from others of trekking across remote parts of Tasmania and other amazing places; people’s moods; and old stories of Tasman, etc. It all happens in the same place, with the same vistas and backdrops, and in the same quarters 3 over each days daily eating ritual. And this is what Human Geographers would call the essence of place, the ‘stage-sets’ plus the ‘play’ working together to make up that philosophical thing known as place.
On this trip my notes were made directly into this laptop whilst sitting up at the end of day, tired and exhausted from all of the walking and working. But there were moments when I would think of something and make note of it in my iphone, handy little beast it is.
From the 1,800+ images I’ve gone through I’m so far most intrigued by 90 or-so of mist/fog. In black and white they have quite a seductive quality and I’m hoping that they will come up well when using grey and black in a series of new drawings. The rocks have also turned out well. I’m still unsure about what to do with the interiors and the rubble, although the latter I will begin to look at images of war and battlefields and see where I can insert rubble. The future looks good...