Returning following ‘Ebb & Flow’ in 2023 and after a successful solo exhibition at Qdos earlier this year, Steve Sedgwick has experienced several inspiring artist road trips this year, informing this current & diverse body of work.
‘Dust and Salt Lines’
“For me the desert is like the sea. Both have an existential pull and both expand perspective.
Light and colour, form and shape, even your sense of time and mortality are brought into focus when you sit quietly on a dry lake bed, painting the dust and salt lines around you.
The now bone-dry Lake Mungo is part of the ancient Willandra Lakes system, once teaming with fish, supporting diverse flora and fauna and indigenous Australians. The oldest human skeletons on the planet were uncovered here in 1969 as sand and sediments were blown by winds across the expanse. (Mungo man and Mungo woman – 42,000 years old). Bones of dinosaurs, shellfish ovens, even Tasmanian Tigers continue to be uncovered here. The lakes may be dry now but their stories are rich and alive.
Lake Tyrell is a shallow salt lake in Victoria’s Mallee district. The shimmery air here makes the change from the dusty earth to the ether sky indiscernible. The wind whispers secrets from across millennia. This ancient place will still breathe, long after we’re gone.”
A verse from the poem that accompanies the exhibition:
‘I love this buggered country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of broken buggered tree stumps,
And lakes that hold no rains.
I love her far horizons,
Her endless dusty roads,
Those broken lines of fences,
Holding in the mournful crows. ‘
