Notions of the Spook: Recollections and Nostalgia Through Personal Artist Experiences of the Contemporary Australian Landscape

Notions of the Spook: Recollections and Nostalgia Through Personal Artist Experiences of the Contemporary Australian Landscape

This practice-led research applies a variation of the Australian landscape en plein air painting tradition (Amory, 2007). Through my own interpretation of processes and concepts inherent to contemporary landscape practice, my paintings explore landscape narratives instilled with personal experiences and memories of place. These experiences and memories manifest through tacit knowledge as a creative presence in my artwork to represent what I have termed ‘the Spook’. The Spook is best described as a feeling – an affect – that represents a creative state that is intuitively informed and honed by the artist. The Spook does not manifest as a physical influence or entity per se, but rather functions as a creative intuition and awareness prompted by the artmaking process itself. Investigating the Spook as part of the overall creative experience provides a prompt to develop greater creative insights into the artist’s insight and the existing parameters and methods that define practice. Historical en plein air artists, Grace Cossington Smith and Ivon Hitchens and contemporary artists such as Joe Furlonger and Lucy Culliton whose practices utilise an ‘informed understanding’ (Sullivan 2010) of personal experiences and memories of place as subject matter, are addressed to inform the idea of the manifest creative presence of the Spook in an artwork. Deploying autoethnography and ethnography as subset methodologies, I unpack the personal narratives within the landscape context, including self and participant reflective journaling and participant surveys as methods. The findings reveal that the Spook is an identifiable and adaptable creative principle of practice that can be applied across creative arts, yet the Spook is individually experienced at different times, and across diverse creative forms. Key outcomes from this investigation into the Spook reveal the fundamental relationship that exists between the artist, the artwork, and the viewer, where the Spook provokes experiential creative cognisance that is ever-evolving and ever-transforming.

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