Art beat
A HEART OF STONE Transplanting herself from the Top End to Alice’s extraordinary landscape saw this artist filled with creativity — and a love of rocks
Landscape artist Linda Joy admits she freaked out a bit when she first arrived in Central Australia. It was 2014 and she was there for a residency with Artback NT. But the Darwin-based artist said being thrust into an unfamiliar environment so foreign to the Top End was a pivotal point in her creative journey.
“I had ordered some canvasses and thought ‘I’ll go for a drive and do some drawings’,” she said. “The night before, I started Googlesearching aerial shots and maps, and looking around for where I could get a helicopter to go over, to do some drawings — but there was really no water around.
“It wasn’t like there were any big rivers because it’s af — king desert. I was like ‘what am I going to do?’ I sort of panicked a little bit. I thought ‘oh s— t’.”
But, determined to embrace the opportunity, Joy jumped in a 4WD and hit the road to explore. She soon found that, despite a lack of lush waterways such as she was used to in the Top End, the powerful rock formations she saw instead were enough to push her along a new path.
“I went for a drive out past Jessie and Emily Gap, and looked out across the horizon and it was just this single line and bush,” she said.
“I camped out at Rainbow Valley, or Wurre, and Chambers Pillar, and all those places, and the rock formations there are just fantastic.
“When I got back to the studio I was drawing every little rock as a water mark. I started getting obsessed.”
Working in this different environment created the “most significant change” in Joy’s practice and kicked off her obsession with rocks and water marks with ink.
“That’s when I started to focus on rocks and from a horizon perspective — previously my work was aerial with metaphors for different objects in the landscape,” she said.
“I was just sitting there for hours and hours and hours making rocks.”
Joy’s exhibition Stone Country opens at Paul Johnstone Gallery in Darwin on Friday, June 30, and incorporates pieces inspired by her Alice Springs residency and Top End works created in the last 12 months.
A $20,000 grant from Arts NT in January allowed Joy to fully immerse herself in her art without the stress of having to earn a crust to pay the bills. She took a hiatus from her teaching job and transformed her home into a studio — she has seen another revolution in her practice thanks to the financial stability provided by the grant.
“Having the time and space to focus really helps you develop as an artist,” she said.
“My visual language, which is a bit of a bank for me, has gone from just coils and rocks and black water to little fire icons and smoke, and I’ve become a bit more focused about the plants. My visual language incorporates lots and lots of different symbols for different elements of the landscape now.”
Camping is an integral part of Joy’s process and Stone Country features many of the Top End’s most picturesque camping spots. A connection with the land allows Joy to be immersed in it, even if she’s thousands of kilometres away back at home in her studio.
“If you sit in the bush that long the surrounds become entrenched in you,” she said. “I might do a drawing of Maguk or Gunlom which might take me 10 minutes, but in the studio when I’m translating that on to the canvas it’s such a mediative process it’s like I’m there. So for six weeks while I’m working on that piece I’m there — I’m at Gunlom, I’m at Maguk. I paint the rocks and I can feel every single one of them.”
Like many artists who dream of quitting full-time work to focus on their art, it was only after teaching art for many years that Joy realised she was craving more creative freedom. So she reignited her personal practice in 2012. It was one of Don Whyte’s Offcut shows that encouraged her to get back into the game and a string of successes soon followed.
“You get caught up in that cycle of working to pay the mortgage,” she said. “One day I was thinking ‘I don’t want to do this — I’m stressed, I’m tired, I don’t do anything (artistically) I love’. I thought I really need to get back to my practice. So I went to my sketchbooks from my uni days, and went to my last drawings, and did a quick couple of things to put in the Offcuts show. They sold immediately.”
Soon after she was a finalist in the Togart Contemporary Art Award and winner of the Katherine Art Prize. She took a trip to Paris before coming back to settle in to the Artback NT residency in Alice Springs, where her work took on new life. Now Joy feels she has hit her stride and is “really f — king excited” about the direction her work is heading.
“I feel blessed,” she said. “I’m not going to say lucky because you create your own luck, but I’m in a really good space and I want to keep going. I’m at the end with this little project, but I’m really not at the end — I’m at the beginning.”