Jan Hogan’s Broken Line is a drawing-based installation inspired by site visits at Mirima National Park, an area outside Kununurra in the east Kimberley region – now characterised by eroding rock formations but at various stages over its ancient history also mountain ranges, seabeds, and sand dunes. It is a site, as Hogan writes, ‘of form and formlessness, a continuous becoming and changing’.
Hogan’s visit to such sites is mediated through discussion with traditional owners and national park management and her own inherent approach to the land. ‘I wish to care for the land’, she writes, ‘and I believe art plays an important role in communicating worldviews … Rather than separating myself from the view as in a traditional European landscape I immerse myself in the environment and learn from the interaction between my art processes and the site.’
For Broken Line, Hogan will instal a large-scale drawing done on a roll of Rives BFK paper which she has dipped in a waterhole at Mirima, cascaded over rocks and drawn on with Sumi ink. In transit and over time the paper has weathered and been worked on both sides by Hogan with ochres and fixative. Further, ‘the drawings have been washed, mended and folded’. Hogan also proposes to add another layer of mark-making to the fragmented roll once in the gallery space, through drawings in charcoal. The installation’s placement in NCCA’s Screen Room ties in well with Hogan’s narrative interest and the way her paper medium, like film, both fragments and fuses time and process.
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