(written whilst waiting at Geneve Aeroport 24th September 2023)

I was stuck…. I am always making work with seemingly no outcome. Lots of images, some quite good, but what to do….

I have hours to wait at Geneva airport and have no wifi, I cannot get it until I check in and that is in about 2 1/2 hours away. Goodness knows what made me get here so early… anxious to go home, maybe?

It has, however, given me something I do not normally have in my day-to-day, and that is; time.

It is a lovely fine day, blue skies only dampened by the smell of cooking oil from the Macca’s restaurant. I am sitting on a terrace overlooking a distant hill. People are smoking. Lots of people do here! I am shocked.

When I went to Santorini to attend the David Campany workshop, I did feel a little trepidatious; would my work come up to the grade? Did I have enough to show? Am I self obsessed? How can I describe what I want to do? What do I actually want to do with the work? Am I trying to fit square pegs in round holes?

I have always been interested in our natural world and what humans are doing to it. Our dad used to get us to cut out the weather maps out of the newspapers and talk to us about the hole in the ozone decades ago in the 1970’s when we were kids. Many of my projects comment on what we, humanity, are doing to the environment.

With this in mind I brought a typology of plastic waste that I had photographed on a beach in Indonesia. The ‘portraits’ of the plastic bottles which were covered in mussels, horrified and intrigued me. The extent of the damage to the beach we were staying at, was horrendous. At the start of 2020 I photographed a similar plastic bottle on a ‘pristine’ beach in south east New South Wales. I couldn’t believe that this bottle which had asian writing on it was on a beach in Australia. It was one of 2 images I made early that year that initiated the #Everydayclimatecrisis Visual Petition. The other was an image of 1000’s of dead ladybirds in the ash on the beach during the 2019-2020 bushfires.

Dead ladybirds in ash during the 2019 NSW bushfires

I spent hours photographing the waste on the beach in Indonesia which was also covered in an oily sludge and you could smell it too.

I have always been interested in the landscape that has been touched by humanity as seen as my Iceland series in 2014 and the #welcomenotwelcome series in 2016. When we were staying on Santorini for the David Campany workshop, I felt that there seemed to be no part of the island that had not been touched by humans. I saw this in Athens also where tourism has made the paths and rocks near the Acropolis to smooth, shiny and slippery it is lethal. I started to make work during the week we were at the workshop because the light was so different to home. I was fascinated by the incomplete buildings, some seemingly completely neglected but I have learned since that the Greek people do not pay tax until the home/hotel is complete. Their style of building almost reflects the style of the ancient ruins. The exoskeletons stand proud, though neglected within the landscape.

So how could these two disparate bodies of work together? David suggested I try. And it was only until Thursday until he started talking about writing about your work that it clicked. I often write snippets of sentences and paragraphs when I get the urge and I love poetry, always have. So I started writing a few phrases whilst David was talking and finished it later… I feel it ties the two bodies of work together. I am very happy with how it looks and my writing, too.

Its title is Monachopsis. Have a look below. I hope to exhibit it next year.

So I have managed to fill in about an hour here at Geneva Aeroport…. It is almost 6pm, so maybe I will have a beer!