Catalogue article by Christine James

Walking at Weereewa – Lynne Flemons catalogue for Goulburn Regional Art Gallery

It is this moment of Australia that I am exploring: fragments never permanently in place, pieces always

in reassembly, new dimensions of Australian belongings, new knowledge of the inspirited earth, new

understandings of the experience of being here.

Peter Read[i]

 

Weereewa/ Lake George has been a place of fascination for artist Lynne Flemons from her

childhood, when she and her brothers accompanied their father Ken Flemons on his field trips

to properties throughout the Southern Tablelands.[ii]A large climatically sensitive lake, Lake

George is a place of dramatic hydrological change. Indeed it is a wetland where the elements of

earth, water, fire and air are never permanently in place, and their movement is impossible to

ignore.

 

Flemons describes it as a place

of magic, as it does speak to us about time and space and memory[iii]

 

The notion of fragments (which may themselves be in a state of flux) standing in for new

readings of the experience of place play a primal role in the development of Flemons’ drawings

as wall installations. Her processes of engagement with the lake bed include walking, collecting,

and drawing en situe. On paper she uses veils, blots, ink and watercolour staining, tracing,

intricate cutting and collage to suggest both her sensorial experiences of ‘being there’, and

the flux of the elements.

 

A sparse, yet active spatiality of the completed collaged works mimics a brightness and a

vastness of light, of earth and sky in a profound communion, which Flemons encountered

from her own walks on the Lake George bed. For that is how it is, to stand or walk along the

edge of one its primeval shorelines, with the other edge of the lake’s bed completely out of sight,

and somewhere in its midst, a series of mirages.

 

The fluctuations of its immense body of freshwater have been the subject of continuous

geological, hydrological, and ecological research since it was first “discovered”, mapped and

the country of the lake’s surrounding hills and plains were settled for sheep and cattle grazing by

Europeans in the early 19^th century.

 

The currently used, and abandoned fencelines of the lake’s vast bed, partially submerged

during its wet years, stretch across its width. In varying states of disrepair, they attest to the

continued existence of sheep grazing. Ironically this land usage can only take place in years

when the lake’s waters have evaporated. In its wet years, they become both obstacles and

resting places for many migratory and breeding waterbirds.

 

In Flemons’ works we recognize amongst their ink stained cutouts her own body’s shadow,

standing alone on the lake’s bed, somewhere far beneath a solitary cloud in a vast open sky, an

elemental event which echoes her own physical sense of isolation. There is a drawn, traced and

cutout collage of a larger than life bones of a sheep’s pelvis, the profile an eagle’s proud head,

long abandoned, tangled fence wire, sometimes worked in red. Large red cut out lines parody

the meeting points of measured survey lines, reminding us of the kinds of land usage that her

father was mapping.

 

Her drawn and cut images of the cracked earth of the dry lake bed beneath her feet complete her

visual meditation most resembling a haiku on the deeply embedded conflict the culture of her

birth has repeated, into this most ancient, austerely beautiful, and alive place.

 

Christine James

2012

 

 

[i] Hanted Earth. Peter Read 2005

[ii] Ken Flemons was an agronomist with the NSW Department of Agriculture in the 1960s

[iii] The artist to Christine James, 2012-07-26