Shona Wilson picks up a yellow blackbutt leaf from the forest floor and carefully places it horizontally into a rock crevice.
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She ensures the tips of the leaf rest inside the edges of the rock to create a gentle curve and then picks up another and another, continuing the process to create a pattern.
“These are the right flexibility for holding,” she explains of the yellowed leaves.
“They’ve got a certain amount of inner strength without cracking. The green ones are a little bit too soft, so these are the perfect leaf for the job.”
The ephemeral artist from Pacific Palms feels at home in the outdoors and uses it as her very own studio space.
“I’ve always used natural found materials to make my work. Being outside is a huge part of my practice.
“A few years ago I didn’t have a studio for about a year so I decided to take the whole practice outdoors.
“I was feeling a little bit sluggish creatively as well, so I sort of returned to my roots, which was Andy Goldsworthy’s ephemeral artworks, and didn’t use any tools. I just found that completely liberating creatively and full of surprises.
“It really showed me a whole new way of being with the materials, I suppose. It’s very different working outdoors with the elements than working indoors where everything is controlled.”
Shona doesn’t bring anything with her to a site, choosing instead to leave it up to what she finds at the place on the day. She said the practice has not only changed her artwork, but her as a person too.
“I think it’s because being outdoors you just become more and more sensitised to the natural world around you and having to work with it rather than against it. It really becomes a collaboration, a dialogue. I’m not trying to impose myself too much on what’s already here.”
She combines three materials at a time, maximum. “Here, I’ve combined the rock and the leaves, but I’ve also gone for the cracks in the rock. That’s the void space, which for me is a very active and dynamic space and often brings with it fear and trepidation.
“Going into that crack I kept thinking a snake could quite possibly live in there. There was that kind of tension, putting my hand in there and being so close.
“Over time you become more at ease with it and I think that’s just generally the more time I spend time in nature the more at ease I become with it.”
Nature has always played a big part in Shona’s life and while growing up, she was out in the bush nearly every weekend with her parents who were avid bushwalkers.
“My mum was a real plant lady and always filled with curiosity and telling us to look at things and look closely at things.
“I think it was that, combined with a trip I did to the Himalayas about 30 years ago when I was just starting my art practice, that started me focusing in on the small things.”
Shona was in her third year and just finishing at the Sydney College of the Arts when she went on a trek in Nepal.
“I went by myself and at the same time I had just discovered Andy Goldsworthy’s work and that was a complete game changer and eye opener for me.
“My whole practice has really been about looking at the details in nature but that has led me to see the micro, and how the macro is reflected in the micro.
"One tiny leaf may have a whole myriad of little systems going on within it, which tells a story, but the veins within a leaf are a fractal of the patterns within trees, which then mirror the way that water flows so that, for me, builds up a very holistic kind of view.
“There’s so much that I don’t know but it gives me an appreciation for the whole system I’m working within.”
She said with materials everywhere, and no need for tools, anywhere can be an art studio.
“Once you start seeing the world as a smorgasbord of materials, anything’s possible anywhere. Or you just start looking at the world in a different way.
“Then the dichotomy starts where it becomes that case of, well if I can use all these things, how do I use them responsibly or in a way that’s sensitive and just doesn’t destroy or butcher or annihilate where you are?
“The more you work out here doing this sort of work the more sensitive you become. I’ve gotten to the point where I feel this resistance about breaking anything or changing anything from the way it is. So that line of how much we can interact with something before we harm it, it’s a very fine line and it’s a line that’s changing for me.”
It’s very different working outdoors with the elements than working indoors where everything is controlled.
- Shona Wilson
Shona has built her art practice into her everyday life.
“I might not be able to come out to a pristine beautiful place every day or even once a week so it might be my backyard or it might be a parking lot that I’m waiting in; it could be anywhere.
“There’s always something you can find to engage with and play with, and the other advantage about this type of artmaking is that you can enter ‘presence’, so being present to something essential.”
She said the state of mindfulness that comes when she gets into the flow and where things become timeless has been incredibly therapeutic.
“Aside from the creativity side of this practice, the mindfulness is probably the biggest advantage to my life and I think to other people who engage with it too.
“It’s pretty easy to get into that zone so when I come out I’m not looking for anything in particular.
“Some days I might have a bit of a plan. I might pass something one day and think ‘oh, I’d like to work there’. Generally, it’s a place of freedom for me, of really free creativity, to see what can come, so I try not to have too many ideas to begin with and just see what presents itself on the day.”
Shona said her work fosters resourcefulness, lateral thinking, creativity, mindfulness and sustainability.
She takes photographs to record what she creates. Depending on where her work is situated determines whether she removes it straight away (something she would do in a national park) or might leave to the weather, serendipity or whoever finds it (usually in a public place).
I was much more relaxed, had a lot more energy, was calmer but more energetic and had more positive thinking.
- Shona Wilson
One year she did a 365 day project called the One a Day Ephemeral Art Project and self-published the photographs in a book.
“The recipe is one ephemeral artwork a day, tired or inspired, five minutes to 50, a daily practice. And that was it, no tools, whatever you could find on site.
“Most of the time I would only spend five to 15 minutes making and that’s actually all you need. Apparently 15 minutes is about our concentration span.”
She noticed the therapeutic benefits to her physical and mental wellbeing as a result of it, which helped her to keep going.
“I was much more relaxed, had a lot more energy, was calmer but more energetic and had more positive thinking.”
She feels photographing her work adds another layer to the making of the work, saying that depending on how you photograph it, you start to see things in different ways and you are again focusing down and becoming present to a small thing in front of you.
As well as photos she’s been creating small films, which she calls Captured Moments. “More and more I became enchanted with what animates the world, rather than the physicality of the object. So it became things like wind or light and shadow play, or the movement of water or the remains of those movements on things.”
Shona also works in schools and feels that some other people and especially children who are not getting outdoors much and spending a lot of time on their screens, have built up a real fear and resistance to being outdoors and things become very fearful for them.
“People are a little bit adverse to being out in nature. It does have the unknown scary elements to it.
“I don’t have a romantic view about nature. It’s tough, it’s harsh and I get uncomfortable a lot of the time. But you learn to deal with discomfort and find ways to work with it just like what happened today. It was so windy over there, it was so uncomfortable but I found another place to be, and we can all do that, and that’s a sort of metaphor for life really, isn’t it?”
She said nature is like her glue and said everyone can benefit from the outdoors.
“You don’t even have to make anything, just come out for a walk. If you decide to have a play it just means you’ll be out here a little bit longer and you’ll get more benefit. And I think showing appreciation, it feels it too. Nature feels our appreciation of it. We feel its frequencies, it feels our frequencies, so we can be mutually beneficial to each other.”
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