Further Jam Tree Gully Concretions

By John Kinsella; posted by Tracy


These concretions were carried out some months ago. It was an extremely windy day, which became part of the process — the wind altering the way the text could be ‘secured’ and thus conveyed to a reader, and even to myself as creator and participant.

As installations, they were obviously highly unstable and temporary, but as I have walked their placement points and zones since, the experience of movement is marked by that earlier engagement. There could have been an accompanying sound track — the wind, a variety of birds, my discussing the dynamic with young Tim who followed me around making comments at salient moments... and reading the pieces aloud, or reciting them in my head.

In a place where we’ve been trying to lessen human ‘intervention’, these are reminders of the crossover and conversations of being ‘living things’ that share space (which we do, of course). They also help remind (me at least) that our withdrawal from space is probably a consequence of trying to balance a very over-determined ‘ledger’ (pure metaphor here, no fiscal actuality!) that has resulted in such massive colonial human imposition that flora and fauna struggle to maintain agency.

Though there is noise all about us (machinery, guns...), the reinstatement of flora, and the fauna that arrive searching out this growing refuge, create walls of ‘silence’ around the space from which we view and attempt to comprehend. I am reminded of Gomringer’s ‘silencio’ — wishful thinking or metaphor? In terms of the texts themselves, their ‘shape’ is a reflection of the ‘ambience’ and way one interprets moods of place (a distorted anthropomorphics), and in this they are concrete representations.

But ultimately, they are unmappings of co-ordinates, an unfixing of points on the maps we create to control. The scratchings in the red-brown ‘dust’ of the firebreak work as markers of associations, parodies of ‘logos’ and ownership (Naomi Klein got over her childhood love of labels!). The more we try to fix the picture, the more unstable becomes the language we use to describe it. And the language that is woven into the picture is at the mercy of the wind, of atrophy. What follows is a selection of concretions from around a dozen texts emplaced and photographed in a variety of ways at the time.

Where the north-east ant colony centres itself.

Plato’s Cave is rarely locked and secured. The Red Shed.

Raingauge, witness to the fading green.

On the firebreaks colour is queried. Someone has passed over. Tread. Trod.

Carried by the wind from firebreak (though ‘secured’) to wild oats.

Logo — not! JTG, acronym for...?

Firebreak scratchings poem — Loss Rarity Bird Gully...?















Two of the texts themselves, which exist as poems outside concretion, outside installation. They are different viewed as such:

and: