Environmental Driftwood Art Wallwork, Prints & Totems

DRIFTWOOD FURNITURE

Artist statement:

Driftwood Art Gathering Experiences

My work with driftwood assemblages and sculptures began in 1998 and has continues to be a major part of my creative output. An article described these driftwood assemblages, which I exhibited in a solo show in Australia in early 2004, as having been created with:  “A sheer depth and determination...Including, death-defying moments grabbing the perfect piece of wood.”

It is true I would be seen scavenging beaches in search of plastics, specific colours and sizes. I was also known for venturing along the edge of Victoria alone in search of driftwood. Boat trips to islands, long drives along four-wheel-drive tracks and scaling 40 meter-high cliffs were all part of the process.

This all sounds exciting and possibly a bit unbelievable, however it is quite true that I would often find myself in dangerous situations.

I remember one time I had walked about 2 kilometers ahead of my brother, who had joined me for a driftwood gathering expedition and I wasn’t able to walk Any further around the rocks, because the tide was up and I could see that there are quite a few choice pieces of driftwood in the next cove. So I decided to climb up over some rocks and proceeded to do this in pretty nimble sort of way, as I move fairly fast over rocks, anyway there was a ledge with a drop of about 1 m, which I needed to swing myself up to to get to the top of the hill which overlooked the cove.

Little did I know that as I swung myself up onto this ledge, there was to be a big brown snake  (the deadly variety) curled up right there. I don't know whether it was a gentle way that I was moving, but instead of that Brown snake rearing its head up an attacking me, it simply found the quickest and easiest way off the rock away from where I stood. There simply wasn't enough room for the both of us. I thank that snake to this day for the decision it took.

If it had decided to bite by attacking me, I would have been in serious trouble. My brother would not have known the trouble I was in and it would have been very difficult for me to move in his direction without causing myself serious problems. I probably would have had a very good chance of not surviving.

This reminds me of another time when I decided to go by myself, also to this similar location. However it was many kilometres on the other side of the river that came out to the sea. Having crossed a wide expanse of Heath, I descended the cliff face, which was my usual way down to this series of beaches, which had many coves full of driftwood which was stacked often 2 to 3 m high. On this particular day I decided to go further than my usual expedition, which often ended up finishing at one point where the rock face dropped dramatically into the ocean. It was a particularly dangerous spot and I often decided not to venture any further once I reached this point.

I had the whole day to myself, so I decided to keep going as it was a beautiful day even though the swell was being unpredictably high, in fact I think it was a day of King waves. I was on a bit of a mission because I had seen a certain type of driftwood stick that was washed up up and down the coast around that area, which was really suitable for me to use as framing for some of my assemblages, so I really wanted to gather as many as possible.

So on I went and did come across many of those prized driftwood sticks that I was looking for as well as a pretty large jumbo garbage bag full of smaller sized rounded off pieces of driftwood, that I used in that particular series. (The driftwood assemblage series). I also found a few very unusual buoys which I also took along with me in my bag.

It was on the way back where I ran into trouble. This I think was probably partially foolish and partially adventurous and brave. There is a point on this rocky cliff face that I was mentioning, they are generally have to take a bit of a jump across to a ledge along the face. On most occasions you just needed a bit of guts to do it and everything was fine. At worst you would slip and possibly end up in the water.

It wasn't a high cliff in fact allege a long this face was probably only 3 m above the waterline however on that particular day there were those king waves coming in quite unpredictably. So here was I move an armful lose to move along sticks over my shoulder and in the other hand I was carrying very heavy chamber garbage bag full of driftwood and some plastics. There was nowhere for me to really throw any of my gathered objects, so if I wanted to get across with everything, I had to take a risk.

That was precisely the time when I could see the King wave on its way and I knew that I had to make a decision then and there to just jump with a whole lot and trust that I was going to get a good foothold and move along out of danger or I was going to have to ditch my effort and quickly retreat with my supply to the last cove and leave it all for another day or as I was leaving the next day, maybe not at all.

So I jumped, and as Grace has it, I was fortunate enough to gain a good foothold in a relatively dry section of the rock ledge, which was enough for me to swing by garbage bag high enough and for me to also climbed high enough before the king wave hit the side of the cliff where I had been standing. If I had moved any slower, I would have ended up in the water possibly hitting my head against the rocks and I imagine that I could have ended up a casualty.

Apart from the few other misdemeanours I've had a pretty good run, when you consider the types of terrain that I have been exploring, I've probably been pretty lucky only to have had these two notable episodes.

Exploring remote parts of Australia is often a treacherous endeavour, especially if you are climbing up and down cliff faces in remote areas carrying heavy pieces of wood. I loved every second of this experience. I love the adventure and spending time with my loved ones, family and friends, trekking to far-flung locations to source these materials. I also love the tactile experience of working with wood. I celebrate the effect nature has had on these individual pieces by bashing them against rocks, fading them in the sun.

I have scoured Australian beaches for found objects which I bring back to my studio to sift, sort, and colour-code for my assemblages, sculptures and installations. As I work with them in my studio I become even more fascinated by the way they have been modified and weathered by the ocean and nature’s elements. My challenge as an artist is to take these found objects, which might on first meeting have no apparent dialogue, and to work with them until they speak and tell their story."

I remember saying in interviews with the media during the late 90’s, that I hoped that one day I would see less and less litter washing up on our beaches, so that quite naturally my work would find a new direction. This has now happened on both levels, in that my work has found new directions and there is less litter washing up on our beaches on a local level at least. The situation with ocean litter on a global level has worsened considerably.

An article written by Jeni Faulkner, which appeared in the Coffs Harbour Advocate, Thursday the 18th March 2003, described the driftwood assemblages and prints, which John Dahlsen exhibited in a one man show, at the John Gordon Gallery in Coffs Harbour as follows:

“John Dahlsen isn’t your average artist. A bold statement to make but appropriate after you realize the sheer depth and determination which goes into the work this man has produced over the past seven years.

Although he has been within art circles for much longer than that, it is only in the most recent years, which have seen Dahlsen create a different form of art with environmental messages and strong statements. It is ‘found’ object art, be that organic or inorganic.

Dahlsen admits in the beginning many people, including himself,  thought he was going a little ‘nuts’ with his work, which had moved from painting to object-driven art.

He would be seen scavenging beaches in search of plastics, specific colours and sizes. He is also known for venturing along the edge of Victoria alone in search of driftwood.

Boat trips, four-wheel-drive tours and scaling 40 meter-high cliffs, were all part of the process for this driftwood exhibition and Dahlsen admits at times there were death-defying moments grabbing the perfect piece of wood.

His exhibition, at the John Gordon Gallery was the first exhibition solely based on Dahlsen’s driftwood collection.

The work on show in the 2004 Wynne Prize, at the Art Gallery of NSW titled “Driftwood Assemblage # 1” was a diptych from this series.

Dr Jacqueline Millner - Essay:

‘A bleached and fractured world surrounds the artist. To organize this mess of corrosion into patterns, grids and subdivisions is an aesthetic process that has scarcely been touched’. - Robert Smithson in Sedimentation essays (cited in Jeffrey Kastner (ed) & Brian Wallis, Land and Environment Art, London: Phaidon Press, 1998, p 27)

Henry David Thoreau, the 19th century American public intellectual acknowledged as one of the founders of the modern ecological movement, made a point of emphasizing the political significance of what he called ‘the art of walking’. Thoreau believed that venturing forth into the landscape on foot, eschewing destinations and concrete objectives, was an unqualified good in itself. Not only did walking lift one’s spirits: more importantly, it served as a constant reminder of the mutual dependence of humankind and nature, of the imperative to protect the environment from harm. More than a century later, the British artist Richard Long literalized the ‘art of walking’ by transforming his walks through the landscape into artworks. In these poetic renditions of land art, Long documented the subtle and ephemeral traces of his acts of walking: the faint line left in grass after his feet trampled it, the simple patterns created after he removed pebbles from his path. In contrast to the massive excavation exercises that comprised the earthworks of pioneering land artists such as Americans Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, Long’s works strike a decidedly gentle note: a quiet but nonetheless insistent call for a different kind of environmental work grounded in the ethics of care.

When Australian artist John Dahlsen began his littoral walks over a decade ago, he was in some respects honouring Long’s tradition of exploring the relation between humankind and the environment through daily, ritual, embodied interaction. In the case of Dahlsen’s practice, however, the ecological dimension was more explicit, for during these saunterings along the coast of his local area in Northern NSW, the artist would collect the flotsam and jetsam washed up on the shore. Unlike Long’s engagement with the natural environment, Dahlsen was actively harvesting from ‘nature’ the many- times-removed products of human manufacture: the raw material extracted from the earth, processed into commodity, used, discarded, and returned by the tide to human use.

For a time, the very act of walking and coastal care comprised Dahlsen’s work, recalling not only Long’s land art, but also other environmental-conceptual works that focused on the cleaning and care-taking of everyday environments. (These include the works of Merle Lader Ukeles, whose performances entailed sweeping, scrubbing and foregrounding the sanitation of particular urban settings, and Helen Meyer Harrison and Newton Harrison, who documented the pollution of the Sava River in Yugoslavia, before devising a counter-pollution strategy.) Soon, however, Dahlsen grew inspired by the objects he collected to create sculptures and assemblages, so that his practice came to combine walking with object and image-making.

The objects yielded by the tide prompted a key question for the artist: how does one give form to the formlessness of detritus? Dahlsen was well aware that the organizing principles he chose would determine the meaning of any work he created. He began by sorting the found objects into material, natural or manufactured, then into colour and size, his process a self-reflexive examination of categorization. These categories suggested particular works: totem poles constructed from buoys or thongs, wall-based collages of driftwood, and, eventually, coloured plastics assembled into abstract fields that came to evoke landscapes. Unlike most environmental artists, Dahlsen made his work not from conventionally ‘natural’ materials — soil, grass, stones, for instance — but rather from the ‘artificial’ materials that nature has reclaimed and sculpted through erosion. His works actively mobilized the unstable boundaries between what is human-made and what is natural.

These works not only transform rubbish into objects of value, raising questions about the assignation of cultural worth. They also compel the viewer to make links between the cycles of production and use of everyday functional objects, and those of art. What distinguishes a piece of plastic ground to crystal-like translucency by time and water, from a work of art? Can art shift our thinking on matters of sustainability, or is it complicit in the exploitation of the earth’s resources for human consumption?

For many of the original land artists, the move to sculptural form carved out of the outdoor public domain was a reaction against the isolation and supposed ‘purity’ of abstract painting. But for Dahlsen, land art-inspired sculpture and assemblage have paved the way for a recent reengagement with painting. Before turning to the found object some ten years ago, Dahlsen’s practice had comprised primarily of gestural abstraction. Now, the time spent exploring environment-based, sculptural and conceptual approaches has radically transformed his painting. For Dahlsen, painting has emerged as a new way to explore the relationship between waste and use, form and formlessness, and environmental empathy and destruction.

Dahlsen’s latest series is appropriately titled The Purge Paintings. To purge is to radically cleanse, to empty out or permanently delete; purging has connotations of violent persecution, as well as of healing and rebirth. On a personal level, Dahlsen could be said to be purging his previous practice in the new work, with all the ambivalence that entails. The term also refers directly to the amorphous extrusions created when a plastics moulding machine is cleaned at the end of a production run. Dahlsen began collecting these cast offs — destined either for landfill or recycling — while researching a public art project for a plastics manufacturer. The brightly coloured and completely random forms are extremely suggestive, generative of all kind of interpretative possibility. Dahlsen treated them at first like readymades — sculptures in their own right. He then began experimenting with their potential as still lives: a quintessentially contemporary still life subject, given their synthetic quality, their disposability, and their integral role in the petroleum industry, a key perpetrator of environmental disaster.

Robert Smithson once claimed that ‘art can become a resource that mediates between the ecologist and the industrialist’ (Kastner: 32), in reference to his many (unheeded) proposals to mining companies to participate in projects of land reclamation. Dahlsen’s retrieval of the waste product of plastics manufacturing partakes of the same spirit, serving to remind us of the interconnectedness of environmental issues, but also attempting to reclaim waste and the destruction of nature in the beauty of art.

Dahlsen’s treatment valorises purged plastic as an object of acute visual interest and cultural importance: the blobs are rendered large, exalted on a plinth. The colours are flat and close in tone, the compositions crossing the genres of still life and abstraction: the materiality of the plastic flattens into pattern, then springs back into organic matter. This play between abstraction and figuration, between synthetic/organic matter and immateriality in the purge paintings, has been applied in Dahlsen’s most recent works to landscapes — dark works whose subtle references to environmental degradation all but disappear before forcefully catching you unawares.

This tension between inorganic abstraction and emotionally charged organism lends these works particular resonance, given their inception in the politics of environmental art. They play out, in elegant and economical aesthetics, the unstable boundaries between the natural and the artificial, reminding us of Wendell Berry’s paradox that ‘the only thing we have to preserve nature with is culture; the only thing we have to preserve wildness with is domesticity’ (Kastner: 17).

Dr Jacqueline Millner
University of Western Sydney
December 2006