Before I go…

I will leave for Uluru shortly. It’s high time I made this journey to the heart of this land. What will I see, what will I do… and more importantly, what will I feel? I am prepared to find this a deeply spiritual experience. Or am I?

Recently I have been meditating on negative space. I love translating everyday stuff into some kind of existential deep understanding. I have a mediocre pastel drawing of my own, hanging in my kitchen. It’s an adequate realisation of a lemon, a chilli and a knob of purple garlic. I drew on a large piece of high quality paper, it was well received. My mistake was in the framing, and thus in not respecting the negative space. I had a vintage oak picture frame, restored with keen attention, that these “three ingredients” would fit within. I had the professionals complete the framing a few years ago and it fits perfectly on a wall between a cupboard and a window. I have often thought something is not right, then recently a lightbulb moment, I realised I had forgotten to include the negative space. The subjects had lost context when they were squeezed into the resurrected frame, and now they appear awkwardly large and simultaneously insignificant.

Right here, right now I seek to restore and cultivate the negative space around my understanding of life in 2021. This is the reason I go to our heartland, for clarity, for meaning and communion. I journey for Dadirri.