About

This piece about home for me has changed a lot over the past few years, from when Katie first proposed the concept to now. My initial idea was simple, a depiction of a place I consider "home", at Encounter bay on the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. But the past few years have been complicated; 2020 started as a move overseas that ended up being almost 15 months living on the road, including 6 unexpected months at Encounter Bay itself.

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I stuck with the initial concept for the work, but the social upheaval of 2020 and a pandemic that turned everyone's life upside down influenced the piece to be of a slightly more existential bent.

This piece depicts four scenes of the Bluff at Encounter Bay, where each scene portrays something different on the Bluff; from young birdlife fighting the elements, the grassy reeds that cover the inclines, the sleepy lizards that rustle through the grass and bake in the sun, to the granite that erupted to the surface 300 million years ago to create the Bluff and the two large islands visible from the summit, West Island and Granite Island.

The overall picture is one of evolutionary codependence, the fauna and flora die but are renewed, omnipresent over an incomprehensible time period. Similarly, our sense of home is finding our own understanding of place in this incomprehensible continuum. This work can be performed by a string trio on modern instruments but there's something about a baroque string trio that delivers this work in a really specifically poignant way, an implicit time capsule, a sense of past informing present.

This piece is written for Katie Yap and Wattleseed Ensemble, with thanks to the Australian Cultural Fund.