The Nomads

In the Nomad series, I took some inspiration from the dot paintings of the western desert Aborigines. In the paintings, I wanted to free my mind from traditional conceptions of time. Instead of seeing time as a sequential process, I wanted to think of it as an instantaneous process. The dots allowed me to do that. Each dot represents the occupation of space. If time is instantaneous, then one person can occupy multiple spaces at the one time and multiple people can occupy the one space.

The paintings blend theories of physics with psychology. There are theories in physics that time is instantaneous. Irrespective of whether the theories are true or not, there are some elements of human perception that conceive time in a non-sequential fashion. For example, people often have attachments to family heirlooms because they allow a kind of bridge across time and space that connects one generation to the next. Likewise, when people live in a place, they leave a part of themselves in that place. In terms of perception at least, more than one person has a special bond to the one place. Finally, hunter-gatherer societies never saw time in the same way as industrial societies. They never had clocks to mark minutes or calendars to mark years. Instead, they had pairings of seasons and place.

Even though humans do perceive some elements of time in an instantaneous fashion, by further blurring time and space even further, I caused myself some cognitive conflict between space usage. To deal with the cognitive conflict, I started conceiving traditions in order to make sense of what had become a very difficult issue. In a way, a tradition lessens conflict caused by different dots wanting to occupy the same space and one person wanting to exist across time. A tradition allows an individual to gain a connection to a collection of individuals in the past, present and future that share the one space. For a tradition to work, individuals need to subordinate individual conceptions of the self in favour of group conceptions of the self. With a group conception of the self that conforms to a tradition, one indiviudal can exist in the past, present and the future all at the same time.

As Australia is a multicultural society, it doesn't have many traditions. Furthermore, as the few traditions that do exist are not universally shared, Australia is a place where different traditions are in conflict. The conflict between the traditions is the central theme of each painting.

Genesis - Oil on canvas

The Others - Oil on canvas

Lost - Oil on canvas