Created on Gumbaynggirr Country (mid-north coast NSW). In acknowledging the traditional owners of this Country I would like to pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Firetides
One late-summer evening in early 2020 we each caught a small bream in the wild surf off back beach. As the sun sunk slowly behind a milky sky, spots of rain (and squadrons of mosquitoes) failed to dampen pleasant imaginings of the sweet meal we’d soon be enjoying back at camp. But savage pre-Xmas fires in the distant ranges and blackened flood debris vomited from the mouth of the Macleay had taken its toll, and the fish tasted as irritable as the ocean. Between showers on the beach next morning a receding tide threw up contorted landscapes of bushfire detritus - ashen geologies and spirit forms ceaselessly redrawn by the slop and boil of the sea - as if the universe itself were re-imagining, reconstituting the scarred terrains and communities of our careless anthropocene.
Firetides #3 (2023)
Digital photograph
Pure pigment print on fine art paper, 83 x 111 cm, mounted on 12 mm form ply
$1100 (mounted) $700 (unmounted)
Edition of eight
[finalist 2023 Northern Beaches Environmental Art & Design Prize, Manly Art Gallery, 4-27 August 2023]
Luca Watson (our son), Firetides #3 and me at the opening of the Northern Beaches Environmental Art & Design Prize, 3 August 2023. Very happy with the black wall - thanks Manly Art Gallery. Lots of interesting, energised work by 215 artists over three venues, 10-5 Tues-Sun until 27 August.
David speaks about Firetides #3 at Manly Art Gallery, 12 August 2023, at a well-attended Saturday afternoon meet-the-artists event featuring 30 or so exhibitors. Congratulations to Belinda Yee, winner of the Works on Paper & Photography Prize. Photos Denise Corrigan
Hello, I’m David… David Watson, and this is my work Firetides. It was created on Gumbaynggirr Country, up on the mid-north coast.You might say it looks a bit like a charcoal drawing … it’s actually a photograph. It is however a charcoal drawing in one sense - it’s a charcoal drawing that the sea made, on a beach I’ve walked and surfed and loved for 50 years, with my family … during an extreme weather event. The caravan park was unlike I’d ever seen it … under water … the sea was irritable, full of detritus coming down the Macleay River from beyond Kempsey, from the tinder-dry ranges up there which had suffered terribly from bushfires. And on the beach the ocean drew these incredible drawings one morning. They’re part of a series I’m working on … this is the first one, Firetides #3. Over the past decade or so I’ve been working with other artists in activist circles, protesting against fossil fuel, exhibiting in regional galleries, calling for action on climate change. But this is a more portentous image, a more personal image, that comes from years spent in a place ... we’ve talked about that this afternoon … loving places, feeling as though you have some kind of depth of appreciation of them … but just as a closing comment on this: I realised only two years’ ago that although I’d been loving this place for decades, like many an Australian I hadn’t even known the name of its local First Nations people, the Gumbaynggirr people … who now are learning their languages again, bringing all of this back, caring for Country in ways that we whities are only just beginning to fathom, understand. And thank goodness we’ve got a chance, in a few months, to begin the process of atonement, of actually thinking about where we are, of loving it, and looking after it. Together. [A national referendum in October seeks to recognise Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Peoples of Australia in the Constitution via a Voice to parliament]
Firetides #3 featured in the April 2024 exhibition unentitled @44 in Rozelle. The show included five photo-works by Denise Corrigan and three by me, as well as a 1970s shadow board painted by my father Ken Watson (1917-2009).
See also @44_rozelle