Rod Moss | FireWorks Gallery

Artist Tabs

Selected works

FW12070 The standoff	FW12069 The calling of Dallas Gorey	FW12068 But these are only our kids' toy guns
FW12067 The diagnosis of Dr. Morse	FW12058 The hard light of day: on the tow	FW17697 Deep waters
FW17699 Umbilical	FW17701 Fitness	FW17723 Playing cards at Uleralkwe
FW18742 And Arthemis moved across the land	FW18745 Families at Uleralkwe	FW18746 Rock enchantment
FW18754 Edwards's Hat	FW21979 Lyalthe after rain	FW22821 Dancing Toe to Toe, Blood Giddy

Pages

Bio

Born: 1948 Ferntree Gully VIC

Rod Moss has lived in Alice Springs since 1984 during which time his art has promoted conversation between First Australians and settler culture. His artwork has been widely exhibited and reviewed in Australia and the U.S.A. reaching a significant audience with representation in 2004 NGV Show, Australian Art Now, and being published in Terry Smith’s Contemporary Art: World Currents. Both memoirs, The Hard Light of Day and One Thousand Cuts won the NT Book of the Year. Hard Light also won the Prime Ministers Award for non-fiction 2011. His third memoir, Crossing the Great Divide, is an account of how he came to ground himself in the Centre’s unique culture. Blue Moon Bay was also published in 2019; a graphic novella and comic satire of small town Australia.

Through his painting and drawing Rod interprets the cultural interface between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Central Australia where he resides. Using graphite and synthetic polymer paint he carefully constructs narratives that challenge conventional images and endow his subjects with a common humanity. The blinding light of the desert environment renders a new way of seeing and elicits a gentle interrogation of the nature of what is accepted as realism.

Excerpt from LOOK CLOSER catalogue essay for The Hard Light of Day: Rod Moss 2006, Rex Butler 2005

View Rod Moss's 2021 All My Fat Country exhibition list and video here

Story/Statement

YOUR HAIR COMES TO ME IN WAVES OF MINERAL BREATH 2021
Alice Spring's eastern boundary is ringed by ridges such as the one depicted and on which a labyrinth of mountain bike trails have sprouted during the recent decade. These are my favourite locations for knitting together what lies before and around me with images floating in my mind.

GRASSES BE YOUR BLANKET 2021
This drawing redescribes a ridge bordering one of the numerous walking tracks of my daily rambles. The scrawled text is a corruption of Chris Whitley's tumultuous and spare, Dirt Floor from the 1998 album of that name.

ON WHICH ANCESTRAL SYLLABLES QUIVER 2021
The title of this work is taken from Barry Hill's poem, Sands which appears in his 2001 anthology, The Inland Sea.

UTYERKKE APWERTE 2021
The title acknowledges the massive and ancient figtree that sprawls over the crest of the hillock.

CENTURIES OF SOBS & LAMENTATIONS 2020
I first cruised passed this cluster in 2002, delivering water to the Whitegate Camp Arrernte families who'd retreated to a more secluded creekbed to avoid payback from the Warlpiri families. One of their young men had killed one of the Warlpiri men. He subsequently served a shortened prison sentence after submitting to a controlled spearing in the legs organised by the Warlpiri family under police supervision.

CREEKBED CLIFF 2020
This is one of several drawings made of features found along Irlpme Creek that occasionally feeds the Todd River. The creekbed is one of our family's choice camping spots. First sight from our swags of the morning sun inflaming the rocks is a premium experience.

OUT OF THE SEED FLIES A SHADOW LOOKING FOR A NAME. CALL IT BREATH. 2021
This cluster near the headwaters of the Todd River/ Lhere Mparntwe, first aroused my attention in the late 1980s. Its dynamism is accentuated by vivid striations of quartz locked in the sombre blue- grey gneiss boulders. The line is Tony Lintermans from his 1989 anthology, Shed Manifesto.

ON THE SHOULDER OF THERRARLETNEME 2021
Caterpillars and wild dogs feature prominently in Arrernte stories proliferating throughout Alice Springs/Mparntwe. Therrarletneme translates as the drooping tail of one of the three caterpillar types, an identity necessarily predating its settler name, Annie Myers Hill, acknowledging a late C19 saddler's wife. The ridge forms the northern boundary of the popular Olive Pink botanical gardens.

AND THEMIS MOVED ACROSS THE LAND 2019
Revisionist history accompanying post-colonialism has encouraged debate and the removal and desecration of conquest markers. In some cases statues have been relocated to less offensive places. With these debates receiving an airing each Australia Day, January 26, a couple of Goya etchings from his Disasters of War folio caught my eye. I figured Ronnie Webb and Gerald Rice about to heave the statue of Themis, the Greek Goddess of Justice, into a pit with Robert O’Hara Burke and Arthur Phillip lying in fragments. They are joining John MacDouall Stuart, an especially contentious Alice Springs sculptural piece. Commissioned in 2009 by members of the Masonic Lodge, the 4 meter concrete giant has been relocated several times in response to community opposition. James Cook is about to join the procession on the ridge overlooking Alice Springs.

EDWARD'S HAT (LARGE VERSION) 2018
Roxanne Neal asked me to make a work commemorating her recently deceased father, Edward. She went into their dwelling and emerged with his cowboy hat and placed it on a chair to photograph. I was surprised. I’d attended several funerals of legendary horsemen where their hat was placed on top of the casket and interred with it. I pondered the photo during that week unclear as to what to do. When I returned to help recycle cans and plastic bottles collected by widow, Bonita, Roxanne assembled her daughters, grandchildren and mum for a group photo. She suggested relocating them before akngwelye apwerte/, the puppy dog Dreaming hill that can be seen from their dwelling two hundred meters distant. Having grown up proximate to it, the children inherited its stories.

ROCK ENCHANTMENT 2017
Singing the Country and the title of Arrernte author, Kathleen Wallace’s superb book, Listen Deeply to Country suggested this fantasy. Many people regard the land as being saturated with spirit entities. Whatever, I’d long harbored the desire to reposition Albrecht Durer’s beautiful angel. The Coulthard children, when asked if they’d like to be in a painting, jumped at the chance. Rodney junior had been playing with a guitar soon after he could walk, encouraged by and imitating his father, a gifted musician.

UMBILICAL & SISYPHUS 2017
High above the town a group of indigenous kids tug-o -war with unseen combatants. In the valley below, nestles the gridded city of Alice Springs. In the distance, Heavitree Gap, where in another painting, Sisyphus struggles to ‘close the gap.’ Two contestants mask their identity. And what is the prize?

FAMILIES AT ULERALKWE 2016
This painting derives from photos taken by my friend, Tom Psomotragos, between 1990 and 1991 when he camped with the Whitegate families. What resulted were four astonishing graphic black & white folios documenting the time, place and people. I collaged several of these for this composition and added the galah flock to spice the drama.

DEEP WATERS 2016
Narcissus was out hunting one day when Echo saw and fell in love with him. She followed him and talked with him. She had never seen anyone as beautiful and declared her love for him. When he rejected her she was broken hearted and disappeared leaving only her voice. Nemesis, the goddess of revenge, punished Narcissus by leading him to a pool in which he saw an image so beautiful he became enchanted and visited the pool daily to gaze at it. Ultimately, he realized that the image couldn’t love him or exist independently of his act of looking at it. His love was obsessive and unrequited. He was enthralled by a reflection, a reversed image he hadn’t seen before, not as he knew himself to be. The story of Narcissus has special appeal to realist artists and he has sometimes been regarded as the inventor of painting.

Renaissance theorist Albertis explained, ’What is painting but the act of embracing by means of art the surface of the pool?’ I’d considered alternate reflected images in the water. What would a contemporary Indigenous youth see? Perhaps a landscape at variance with that surrounding him? Possibly ghosted members of an earlier generation. I wanted to say something about the confusion confronting the present generation, the welter of imagery arriving through social media, the loss of language and relevance of much old story, the displacement from traditional ‘country’. When Jason Webb and I arrived at Wigley’s Waterhole where I’d planned the setting, recent rain had stirred the water and inadvertently, provided the answer. Jason’s reflection would be muddied.

FITNESS 2016
Friend and marathon devotee, Dr. Howard Goldenberg, regular participant in the Alice Springs annual marathon, posed for this (as Freud on the couch and a doctor listening to a rock rather than his patients in earlier works). I’d thought to contrast the disparate recreational pursuits of the cultures re-describing a moment that recurs regularly on the shared riverside path coursing from the CBD south to Heavitree Gap.

THE ANATOMY LESSON 2012
Inverting the usual course of looking at indigenous people has been a recurrent occupation. In this instance, I played with Rembrandt and Mantegna antecedents. And who should be anatomised, scrutinised, and placed under interrogation, if not myself? The Artist

‘The painting is shocking because it goes further than nakedness. It represents an artist who has made an offering of his whole body. The body is, admittedly, a corpse, as dead as the figure painted by Rembrandt in 1632: the body, barely covered with a loin cloth, is stretched in a posture of absolute surrender, akin to Christ on the Cross. Yet one pulls back from the temptation to make much of this thought. The painting is drained of anguish. It simply presents Rod’s body as it has been offered body and soul to the Aboriginal men he has befriended in their years of suffering…’ Barry Hill

THE STAND-OFF 2006
My son, Raffi, reported over Easter 2006 how he'd been bailed up on his bike by a taunting ring of indigenous youths on the track that runs over the hill near our Alice Springs home. Any potential scuffle was aborted when, fortunately, one of the lads recognised him. He rode on home unscathed but shaken by the event.

Such incidents are indicative of the racial tensions that percolate each day. His childhood mates, Patrick Hayes, Johnathan, Max and Daryl Loo-Hayes surround him in this re-staging at the very site where the incident occurred on the edge of the town estate.

All text courtesy of the Artist

Education
1995 Master of Visual Arts, Monash Gippsland University College
Documentation: Dwelling in Arrernte Country
1992 Monash Gippsland University Graduate Diploma Course Examination
1991 Exhibition of paintings and documentation of course work including Research Paper White Art Through White Gate
1974–78 Chisholm Institute Diploma of Art and Design (Painting)

Exhibitions – Solo
2022 All My Fat Country, Burrinja Gallery, Upwey
2021 All My Fat Country, FireWorks Gallery, Brisbane
2019 Crossing the Great Divide, FireWorks Gallery, Brisbane
2017 Mirrors, FireWorks Gallery, Brisbane
2016 The Origin of the New Poetics, Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne
2014 DRAWN, FireWorks Gallery, Brisbane
2014 Layered & Burnished, Nevada State Gallery, Las Vegas
2014 Whitegate_Where Art and Life Collide, Burrinja Gallery, Upwey
2013 One Thousand Cuts, Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne
2013 Anatomy Lesson: You.Me.Us, Araluen Cultural Centre, Alice Springs
2012 Mirror, FireWorks Gallery, Brisbane
2011 Mirror, Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne
2010 Déjà vu: The Hard Light of Day, FireWorks Gallery, Brisbane
2010 Hard Light of Day, Peta Appleyard Gallery, Alice Springs
2009 Agony in the Garden: The Diagnosis of Dr Goldenberg, Anna Pappas Gallery, Melbourne
2008 Intervention, FireWorks Gallery, Brisbane
2008 Art at The Heart Regional Conference, Convention Centre, Alice Springs
2007 The Heart of the Matter, City Lending Library, Melbourne
2007 Even As We Speak, Uber Gallery, Melbourne
2005 The Hard Light of Day, FireWorks Gallery, Brisbane
2004 Big Country Small Histories, ARC1 @ Span Flinders Lane, Melbourne
2000 Once Upon a Time in the Centre, FireWorks Gallery, Brisbane
1999 Whitegate Mob, Kluge-Ruhe Foundation, Charlottesville VA
1999 Outback Art, Columbus State University, Columbus Georgia
1998 Where Do You Come From Brother Boy?, Araluen, Alice Springs
1998 Where Do You Come From Brother Boy?, FireWorks, Brisbane
1997 Rocks & Hard Places, Prospect Gallery, Adelaide
1997 Rocks & Hard Places, Port Nourlunga Arts Centre, SA
1996 Pushing Up River, FireWorks Gallery, Brisbane
1995 Dwelling in Arrernte Country, Araluen, Alice Springs
1995 Dwelling in Arrernte Country, FireWorks, Brisbane
1995 Dwelling in Arrernte Country, Switchback Gallery, Gippsland
1995 Territorial Bodies, Tin Sheds, Sydney
1994 Rod Moss Paintings, Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne
1994 Rod Moss Paintings, FireWorks Gallery, Brisbane
1993 Smack Daub in the Middle, The Residency, Alice Springs
1992 Territory Perspective's Artist of the Month April, Development House, Darwin
1992 24-Hour Contemporary Art Space, Darwin
1992 Stuart Gerstman Galleries, Melbourne
1990 Showcase Gallery, Darwin
1990 Stuart Gerstman Galleries, Melbourne
1990 The Araluen Centre, Alice Springs
1987 Greenhill Galleries, Adelaide
1986 Hogarth Galleries, Sydney
1984 Manuka Galleries, Canberra
1983 Profile Gallery, Melbourne
1978 Hawthorn City Art Gallery, Melbourne

Exhibitions – Group (Selected)
2024 Evidence of Scale IV, FireWorks Gallery, Brisbane
2024 Soakages, FireWorks Gallery, Brisbane
2023 Evidence of Scale III: Drawing & Sculpture, FireWorks Gallery, Brisbane
2023 Morbid Curiosities, FireWorks Gallery, Brisbane
2022 Evidence of Scale II: Drawing & Sculpture, FireWorks Gallery, Brisbane
2020 Stockroom Strays, FireWorks Gallery, Brisbane
2020 Figuratively Speaking, FireWorks Gallery, Brisbane
2020 Still in the Desert, FireWorks Gallery, Brisbane
2017 Burnt Earth; A Multi Media Journey, Delbridge Hall, Gippsland
2016 Black, White & Restive, Newcastle Art Gallery, NSW
2016 For The Birds, Framed Gallery, Darwin
2015 Redlands Art Award, Sydney
2014 Layered & Burnished, Nevada State University, Nevada
2012 Art of the Nomad, Chan Contemporary Art Space, Darwin
2006 The Sound Of The Sky: 200 years of non-indigenous visual response to the NT, Museum & Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin
2005 Seeing The Other, Kluge-Ruhe Foundation, Charlottesville VA
2005 Alice Spring's Artist's Survey Show, Araluen Cultural Centre, Alice Springs
2005 The Dark & The Light III, FireWorks Gallery, Brisbane
2004 Contemporary Australian Art, Ian Potter National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
2003 People, FireWorks Gallery, Brisbane
2003 True Blue, Framed Gallery, Darwin
1999 Big Smoke, Coo-ee Gallery, Sydney
1996 Wijay Na, 24 Hr Art, Darwin
1996 Eyes on the Ball, Waverly City Gallery (Curator Chris McAuliffe), then touring 1997
1996 Sub-Urban, Fremantle Arts Centre (Curator Thelma John)
1994 Contemporary Territory (Curator Dawn Mendham)
1994 Faces and Figures, The Araluen Centre (Curator Alison French)
1992 Graduate Exhibition, Monash University College Gippsland, Latrobe Valley Arts Centre, Commercial Road, Morwell
1991 National Students Show, Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne
1990 Balance 1990, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane
1990 Australian Contemporary Art Fair, Royal Exhibition Buildings, Melbourne
1990 Outback Originals, Outback Gallery, Boulder, Colorado
1989 One Country Two Views, The Araluen Centre (Curator Joanne Boniface)
1988 Fletcher Jones Invitation, Warrnambool Regional Art Gallery, Warrnambool

Awards
2014 Chief Minister’s NT Book of the Year Award – A Thousand Cuts
2013 Centralian Advocate Art Award Winner
2011 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction, Australia
2002 Tennant Creek Art Award, Northern Territory
2001 Tammy Kingsley Award, Alice Springs
2001 Alice Prize – Highly Commended, Alice Springs
1998 Outback Art Award, Broken Hill
1992 Professional Development Grant, Australia Council for the Arts
1991 Painting and Residency Prize: Inaugural National Student Art and Design Exhibition, Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne
1984–2008 Various awards and acquisitions including Alice Prize, Tennant Creek Prize, Centralian Advocate Prize, Northern Territory Art Award; residencies at Broken Hill and Columbus State University, Georgia, and exhibitions at Kluge-Ruhe Foundation, University of Virginia, Charlottesville VA

Published Essays
2008 Big Country Small Histories, Imagine Alice pp16-20
2008 Henry Smith’s Big Trees Exhibition notes at Araluen
2007 Even As We Speak, Arena Mag no87
2005 Stumbling Into Dreamtime, Arena Mag No79 Oct/Nov pp44-45
2003 Hunting On The Sabbath, Overlander Spring issue no 72 pp70-72
2002 Sacred Space, Henry Smith’s exhibition at Araluen (Catalogue notes)
1997 Elegy, UTS Magazine November
1996 Northern Territory Government 1997 September (Calendar)
1996 Transcendental Landscape Revisited, Oz Arts Issue No 13
1996 Towards a Realism at Wijay Na? NT Museum (Conference Paper)
1995 The Stones Just Keep on Coming, Barking Dogs p7
1994 Scottish Narratives of the Centre, Oz Arts Issue No11
1993 Only Yesterday, Oz Arts Issue No5 p60
1993 John Anderson: The Figurative Tradition, Mornington Regional Gallery (Catalogue)
1992 On the East Side of Alice's Face, Catalogue essay, 24-Hour Art Darwin
1992 A Softer Blanket of Ruin — 1985-92, Catalogue essay, Stuart Gerstman Gallery
1992 Catalogue essay Graduate Exhibition, Latrobe Valley Arts Centre, Morwell
1992 Interview with Mandy Martin in Periphery
1990 b1990: Views Visions Influences, Catalogue notes Queensland Gallery
1988 Catalogue essay Fletcher Jones’ Invitation, Warrnambool Regional Art Gallery
1987 Catalogue essay Warwick Armstrong's Survey Show, Devise Gallery
1987 Cover Art for Tim Rowse’s Indigenous Futures & Micky Dewar’s Never Never (Survey of Territory Literature) and Will Dobby’s music cassette This Piece of Dirt

Published Material
2019 Blue Moon Bay
2019 Crossing the Great Divide: Memoir of an Artist, Wild Dingo Press
2017 The Hard Light of Day, Skyhorse Publishing, New York
2017 Reason & Lovelessness, Barry Hall
2017 Extraterritorial Glitch: Anti-Telluric Spectrality and Hyperspatial Wandjina, Astarte Rowe, Art & Australia Issue One: Extraterritoriality, Victorian College of Art
2014 Le Monde La Vie 20-21 Sept
2014 One Thousand Cuts, Rod Moss
2010 The Hard Light of Day, Rod Moss
2007 Myths, Stereotypes and Nationalism in Australian Visual Culture, Traudi Allen, MacMillan
2006 The Sound of the Sky, Daena Murray pp185-194
2006 Cover for Globalism Institute, RMIT
2005 Sylvia Kleinert & Rex Butler’s catalogue essays for The Hard Light Of Day, FireWorks Gallery, Brisbane
2005 Naked In Alice, Barry Hill, Arena Magazine no 75 pp36-38 (Front & Rear Covers)
2005 Crash Sites, Sylvia Kleinert, Artlink vol 25 no 2 pp30-35
2004 The Makers, Julia Copeland, July 23rd on Radio National
2004 Art Almanac June p49
2004 The Colour of Rupture, Robert Nelson, The Age June 30th
2004 The White Gaze on Aborigines, The Age July 3rd
2004 Rod Moss’s Royal Portraits, Rex Butler, Australian Art Collector 28 pp98-101
2004 Catalogue 2004 p33 & p173
2004 Dancing on the Edge of the Abyss, Rex Butler, catalogue notes for Arc 1 show
2003 Working Backwards, Daena Murray, Conference paper, Art Gallery of Western Australia
2002 This is not an Aborigine, Rex Butler, Paper for NSWG Art Historian’s Conference Dec 6-7
2001 The Hottest Gallery in the World p45
2000 Cultural Insight, Brisbane News, Phil Brown
2001 Once upon a Time in the Centre, Eyeline Summer Edition p44 Alison Lee
1999 Artist Breaks New Ground, Kelly Chapman, Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, Georgia
1998 John Morton: The Horse’s Mouth, Museum of Victoria publication
1998 Them & Us: Cuts Both Ways, Kieran Finnane, Alice Springs News
1998 Art Monthly April
1997 Many Rivers To Cross, Stephanie Radock, Adelaide Review
1997 Saltwater Freshwater Borewater pp 12-14 Campfire Group
1996 Central Psyche, Kieran Finnane, Art in Australia Vol34 pp40-4
1996 Peripheral Visions, Charles Green p130
1996 Black & White Art, Mick Paskos, Fremantle Gazette 12th July
1996 Wijay Na?, Daena Murray, Art Monthly No 92 August
1996 Radio National Arts Interview with Martin Portus & Peter Adsett
1996 Wijay Na, Suzanne Spunner, Real Time July/August
1996 Wijay Na? Papers pp34-38 24Hr Art ed Jackie Wurm
1995 Territory Picture Show catalogue article Dawn Mendham
1995 Brush Power, John McDonald, SMH 21 Oct Spectrum 15
1995 Who's Who of Australian Visual Arts, Thorpe p220
1995 Contemporary Territory, Maurice O'Riordan, Eyeline 25 p46
1994 Contemporary Territory, Dawn Mendham, Catalogue
1994 Rethinking Regionalism, Terry Smith, Art in Australia
1993 Art in Australia Vol 30 N3 Autumn p386
1992 Gallery Scene, Rebecca Lancashire, Sunday Age 16 April p26
1992 Gotham City Gossip, 3RRR interview with Roger Taylor
1991 Isolation Art, Rosalinde Reines, Mode August p81
1990 Choice of Three Styles, Dr June Kane, NT News 10 April
1990 Purity Calls May Be Paternalistic, John McDonald, Sydney Morning Herald 10 March
1983 Art in Australia Vol 20 N3 Autumn p395

Collections
Private collections Australia wide including Alice Springs, Darwin, Sydney & Melbourne
The Howard Black Collection, Sydney University Union
Northern Territory Museum of Arts & Sciences, Darwin
Anglicare, Darwin
Alice Art Foundation, The Araluen Centre, Alice Springs
Artbank, Sydney
BHP Billiton, Melbourne
Alice Art Society, The Araluen Centre, Alice Springs
Charles Darwin University
Tennant Creek Civic Centre
Queensland Art Gallery
Moree Plains Regional Art Gallery
Newcastle Gallery
Burrinja Art Gallery, Victoria
Parliament House, Canberra
Alice Art Society, The Araluen Centre, Alice Springs
State Library, Melbourne
City Lending Library, Melbourne
Alice Springs Centrelink Building
Prospect Council Chambers, Adelaide
Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery
Kluge Ruhe Foundation, University of Virginia, USA
Columbus State University, Georgia, USA
Wollongong University, NSW
University of Queensland, QLD

Essay

Newcomers to Mparntwe/ Alice Springs are stunned by its visuals. Amateur and professional artists feast on its topographic variety so at variance with most settings. Though the social scene just cited took precedence in my work I was mindful of the environmental impact colonisation visited upon our country. Concident with 1960s readings about First Peoples were warnings about Climate Change and our overpopulated world.

It has wrought cataclysmic disasters across the planet, species loss, warming oceans, fires and floods of great magnitude and increasing frequency. The Covid pandemic forced many denialists to temper or revise opinions. Indeed the above events have given new-found credence to long-held indigenous practices that nurture the ground on which we stand. As the scale and timelessness of climate collapse disrupts food security and causes mass migrations the bell tolls for us all.

With these factors in mind I started describing the country which I share with Arrernte families, and walked, camped and hunted over during the decades. This was the country that held the stories and law crucial to Arrernte well-being.

While some drawings and paintings acknowledge places of Arrernte significance their deeper meaning in law and supporting networks remain the property of the initiated. Yet they help me identify with vibrant energies once shared with the many friends no longer here.

For coastal dwelling Australians the arid zone is a foreign country. Great space is the game changer with pollutant free air and unparalleled lucidity. Such exposure can be intimidating. Though bearing huge botanical variety, trees, shrubs and grasses prosper at discrete distance from each other. The place is like a maginificent, thoughtfully planted garden.

The unpredictability of rain is an abiding fact of desert dwelling. Few places experience the dramatic transformation following a downfall. Insects, frogs, birds, mammals, flourish. Flowers burst forth. Shrubs blossom. Grasses resurrect the greening world. This drama of weather, the powerful luminenscence, the antiquity of rocks, these heighten my insignificance. Drawing is my means of entering their magnitude.

When beginning to chart locations to draw like a parched finch I gravitated to water places where my family swam and camped after good rains. Lyalthe/ Wigleys Waterhole was a prime spot, as were Atherreyurre(euro dreaming)/ the Telegraph Station and Anthwerrke/Emily Gap. These prime kwatye alaye/ water locations are foundational in Arrernte stories tying together numerous associations with other water dependant lives.

Slowly, generationally, we discover means to express and explain ourselves to the circumstances of our arising. I reside in country that has been fully accounted for by the Arrernte. They read its complexity with understanding that could only arise from a relationship of symbiosis millennia in the making. Stories and namings embed life-sustaining meaning to the country; stories that humanise and thus, befriend the country. Stories are celebrated and memorised, embodied through song and dance on both a grand and specific scale. Do not to forget from where you came.

The drawings of country, like the popular ‘dot dot’ paintings are acts of befriending and belonging, which I, dependant on sustenance delivered from afar and ‘only yesterday’ in Arrernte parlance, aspire to through drawing; intimate earth portraits, though plucked from nature’s chaotic abundance that seek to show the organic rhythms undergirding all life.

While not abandoning abstraction I opt to keep close to the ground, prioritising the concrete and particular. It’s the concrete that is truly complex. The sense of the tangible and sensuous lies at the heart of my aesthetics, a realism consistent with paintings derived from Whitegate experiences. As with the paintings for the most part, I eschewed endistancing panoramas. Close up and personal was my creed.

Our love for country hopefully arises from active commitment and openess to its many manifestations. That it engages in visceral exchange empathising with the loss of plant and animal species with the same profundity we experience with the loss of family, friends or pets. It may not be obvious to the untrained eye how our culture has
impacted this arid zone other than the well publicised corruption of water sources, buffel and Love grass numbering amongst instances causing Aboriginal grief. So much for schoolboy memories of McKellar’s romantic love for her sunburt country. The sun still burns though increasing urbanisation has rendered such sentiments impotent or in need of re-evaluation in the face of our warming planet. For urbanites images of country are ‘out there’, delivered by television and social media.

Whatever impact rabbits, cats, sheep, goats, horses, donkeys, camels and cattle have had on the environment I leave to those better informed. Pastoral leases granted to settlers in the late C19 were the most dramatic cause of frontier conflict. Herds and flocks were given priority over the Arrernte and other desert groups most precious resource. There was little choice but to assemble at missions or engage in the stockwork on Stations that had so abruptly compromised their lives. Addionally, as tarred roads replace dirt tracks the spread of introduced weeds accelerates.

It was soon after Ronja’s 1988 birth when McKellar’s poem flashed before me while chatting with one of the Neal brothers. He was shoeless. That wasn’t so remarkable in the context of his family at Whitegate town camp. What drew my attention were the scores of yerre/small black ants, undeterred by his presence, continuing their hurried journey en route across his bare feet.

“Don’t the ants bother you?’ I asked

‘No. I not frighten of my country, Rod.’ Christopher was momentarily confused by my question and after a brief pause added, ‘I love my country.’

That openness, that embrace said something distinct from sentimental attachment or some idealistic notion of love of country, the kind I associate with the jingoistic love of country often attending recitations of our national anthem, for instance. His utterance carried total conviction, his body literally placed on the line in a way difficult for me to fathom.

Which brings me to rocks. Certain scenes pull my attention for their summaries of shape, texture, scale and so on. They might present as drawings but they are not drawings. Only work makes drawings. And through the care of construction, cumulative caresses, touchings, tender or vigorous, art might also triumph and love emerge.

Rocks have always had their way with me. They manifest the history of the planet, capturing eternal antiquity, simultaneously distant and urgent, surrounding yet fleeing. As a child they weren’t in my eucalypt and fern environment. However the giant granite boulders at Shiprock Falls north of Gembrook and majestic massifs forming Mounts Bishop and Oberon at Wilsons Promontory were regular destinations and subjects of adolescent doodlings. They prompted geological imagination, pondering the 4.5 billion years since our planet’s fiery origins. Was I attributing sentinence to rocks by calling them bold and muscular while forming an aesthetic of sensuous embodiment?

While these were settled, frozen things, the rock riddled ranges near home and up Todd River’s headwaters suggested a dynamic still unfolding. Here I identified with an elementary convulsion. If those old southern granites were timeless, here I perceived urgency. Rush and vortex constellated in the raw conglomerate of sandstone, gneiss and jagged quartz. Scant vegetation gives ready access to these qualities. Rocks thrive.

Rod Moss 2023

Past exhibitions

SOLO

All My Fat Country 2021

Crossing the Great Divide 2019

Mirrors 2017

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