Method for creativity

Still Breath

Breathe
and practice what you love
You don't have to plan to achieve
You don't have to achieve to succeed
But you might be surprised by what becomes...

Jay Dee Dearness is an artist and printmaker who came for a residency over August/ September 2010. She came bustling with ideas and plans. Perhaps we slowed her down, introduced her to place, reminded her to breathe. Yet, by the end of the first day she had set up the studio, taken pinhole digital camera images, and was already printing. She was inspired: by a beautiful curved open prickly crows ash seed that we gave her, by the evening sunsets that we watched from our outside stage, and by her small straw bale guest house, made of re-used materials borrowed from no longer wanted places.

Susanne was artist-in-residence at the Cooroora Institute in October 2008. This is a review by Tamsin Kerr of an earlier exhibition.

Subversive art, subaltern landscapes: the surfacing of Susanne McLean

There is a brand of postcolonial theory that emphasises the hidden, unconscious influences in our lives, and challenges dominant assumptions. While commonly applied to the unacknowledged influence of colonised indigenous cultures, subaltern theory might analogously be applied to the influence of the land. Perhaps our cultural intelligence actively emerges from a regional immersion in the landscape, an embeddedness in place. The land might play a role in evolving a community’s intelligence. Certainly, the land is used to sustain both humans and their stories. Might it be more than a passive resource; even be recognised as an active influence? How might we express its generally unacknowledged influence? Perhaps we might hear the active voice of the land though the creative arts of its inexpert inhabitants, rather than through external and rational expertise.

New York sculptor Rex Kalehof during his residency.