When I was thinking about creating some new work for Cementa the obvious starting point for me was landscape. This inevitably meant tracing some of the lines that link Kandos to its surrounds including following the road that runs into the Wollomi National Park. Reflecting a little on Richard Long's work as I went brought to the fore a variety of thoughts around the different kinds of the line that run through the landscape: creeks, rivers, roads, walking tracks, (and the lines of trackless walks), strata, lines of flight, gravity's implied lines (the imagined fall), power lines, the conceptual, poetic and somewhat incongruous lines (coal fired power crossing world heritage wilderness), lines of projected consciousness (linking the places we know in projected imaginings).
The task of the work was then to try to channel some of these many conceptions of lines in the landscape into a form or improvised poetic expression that itself was another series of lines. Dunns Swamp was a great location to do this sort of work. There is a real sense of flow in the landscape despite the fact that the waterway has been formed by stopping the flow of a couple of creeks with a dam.
More generally Cementa has been a great opportunity for me to try out a new way of working that combines my interest in freestyle rap and poetry and a creative engagement with landscape. The idea is that this might be a different kind of concrete poetry, concrete in its connection to time and place rather than in relation to typographic elements.
