So the trees in the Charred forest work are camphor laurels, which come from a friend's property around near where I live. For a long time I've been fascinated by the fact that Australia's two main weather conditions are fire and water. We either suffer from bushfire or we suffer from drought or flood. Anyway, the region that I live in is prone to all of those things, and I have a very dear friend, Andy Plummer, who owns hundreds of acres of forest around where I live, and it's all camphor wood forest.
Unfortunately, camphor wood is a pest and it's killing off all indigenous species. So Andy is, systematically reforesting with indigenous trees. So when he was uprooting all of this camphor laurel, I thought this was my chance to actually start working, I've been actually thinking of Charred forest for about six years. Some of my ideas take a very, very long time to materialise.
But when I saw Andy just burning, literally burning up all the camphor laurel because he was getting rid of it, I asked him if I could have some of those logs to make some sculpture, and he allowed me to do that.
The logs are charred and blackened, and then there are conical holes that are drilled into it, and those conical holes end up being quite light in colour, in contrast to the charcoaled wood. And I think the feeling is like starlight is penetrating into these dead branches. And so here again, we have the seeds of life coming into something that is apparently dead, again, it's the cycle of birth and death.
While I was watching Andy cutting down all the camphor laurels and cursing them as pests, which they are, I was also conscious of the fact that in China, where my ancestry comes from, camphor wood is considered sacred. And so again, you know, things that are displaced, become pests in other conditions. And that always amazes me about how tightly woven, or how beautifully constructed an ecosystem is, and how we have to take care of it. The perforations in the trees, in the camphor wood and charred logs, as I said, represent starlight, but I use that motif of perforations a lot in my work, and that's been happening over the last couple of decades.
And for me, those holes are kind of symbolic and even actually the reality of the interpenetration of realities. So when a hole is cut, another reality seeps in. And I guess that's metaphorical for my own sense of existence in the world as never being quite this or that, never being quite Chinese enough, certainly never being white enough.
Somehow that whole way of making work, of work that consciously is about the way in which different things mix up and penetrate each other to create new things, that's been a constant motif in my work for a very long time.
