CIRCADIAN RHYTHMS
2011
CIRCADIAN RHYTHMS
Digital prints, 51 x 150cm, edition of 5
ARTIST STATEMENT
Without set times to get up, go to work or sleep, the body sets up it’s own rhythms. Without clocks, TV, stereo, phone and power point convenience the mind too sets new patterns. As my daily rhythms synced with those of the island I created a collection of images that married the 24 hour cycle of daytime and night, investigating the dual characteristics of incredible natural beauty and the succession of human endeavour and it’s abandonment.
Maria is a strange place, like a movie set, a ghost town, stout buildings plonked onto vast lawns and surrounded by forests and cliffs. It bustles with largely introduced native animals: wombats, cape barren geese, penguins, wallabies and roos. I lived at Darlington, an abandoned penal settlement littered with the architectural triumphs of forced labour. The late 19th century and into the 20th century saw Darlington’s population grow to over 800 people, flourishing with the grand plans of Diego Bernnachi’s ‘Riviera of the South’. Vineyards, orchards, sheep farming and the Portland Cement Company were established before Maria was abandoned once again. Most of the last century saw the island settled with a small community of farmers and fishermen before they too left the island and it became a national park in the 1970’s. For 2 months in late 2009 a small fisherman’s cottage in the sand dunes housed my bed, food and fire but it was outside in the lonely and windswept landscape of Maria Island National Park that I spent most of my time.
No one lives on the island except a handful of Parks and Wildlife staff. During the day the landscape is speckled with day visitors, walkers, scientists and school children exploring the historic buildings and natural wonders. At night, with most people gone home on the last ferry, campers are left largely in a darkened landscape. They avoid exploring its eerie night time grandeur; fear and the stories of ghosts penitentiary. My images capture this 24 hour cycle, juxtaposing and blending the opposing visions of the clarity of nature in the sunshine and the stoic sinister empty buildings in the dark. These compositions convey the dreamlike and surreal nature of Maria Island, the duality of night and day in a landscape with a history of nature preserved but radically altered and punctuated by architectural monuments to human intervention.
CATALOGUE ESSAY
Fiona Fraser’s collection of digitally manipulated photographs, Circadian Rhythms, foregrounds both the artifice of the medium and the eeriness of her subject. Maria Island troubles distinctions between the manmade and the natural, the living and the long-gone, control and abandon. These uncertainties also inform Fraser’s aesthetic.
From top to bottom Circadian Rhythms 10 pictures a band of blue sky; a sloping roof of grey tiles; a motley wall of sandstone blocks and red bricks; a wooden brace atop a wide wooden door and then, strangely, in place of earth, a swathe of banded sandstone, its mirrored striations coloured pale maroon or mud-red. The building is Maria Island’s Commissariat: the patterned sandstone a detail from the island’s Painted Cliffs.
The natural stone blocks that formed the original walls of the Commissariat were quarried during the island’s first convict era (1825 – 1832) not from sandstone, but rather from nearby deposits of dolerite and limestone—the latter from cliffs roughened with the fossils of Permian period molluscs and coral polyps. The Commissariat has functioned as a storehouse and an industrial warehouse; it has been left to its own devices and the devices of nature; and now, as the Visitor Information Centre for Parks and Wildlife Service Tasmania, it is the first port of call for tourists on the island, who have perhaps come to see an area that was once a convict quarry and is now a site of geological significance: the Fossil Cliffs.
The Painted Cliffs too draw tourists. Their name suggests human intervention, and they look as though they have been tie-dyed in coffee, honey and rust. In fact, rust did play a role in their “painting”. Between 10 and 20 million years ago, an extended period of warm, heavy rain leeched iron oxide from the island’s dolerite mountains. Eventually, flows of rusty groundwater reached exposed sandstone, staining its pale caramel with irregular concentric shapes. The effect is one of artifice, without the mediation of the artificial.
By contrast, Fraser’s photographs flaunt digital manipulation. A building is rooted in a base of trees, which grow down into a second sky. A tea-brown creek flows out through the door of a clay-coloured house. And a storehouse built by convicts meets the material of its reconstruction. Circadian Rhythms thus exposes the strangeness that underlies a picturesque tourist destination. Fraser’s blatant use of artifice pushes past the dichotomy of “natural” and “unnatural” towards a tense triptych: Maria Island’s long history of making, remaking and unmaking.
Gabrielle Lis
June 2011
EXHIBITION DATES
Queensland Centre for Photography, Brisbane Feb - March 2011
Sidespace Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart 14 - 19 July 2011
The Chapel, Maria Island National Park October 2011 - May 2012
Link to Mercury newspaper article, Fiona's residency at Maria Island.
THANKS
Rob, Salamanca Arts Centre, Queensland Centre for Photography, Gabrielle Lis, Pete, Donnalee, Nathan, Martin Fieldhouse, and all of the Parks staff at Maria Island National Park for their invaluable assistance and support.
This project was assisted through Arts Tasmania by the Minster for the Arts.