So sometime around the mid 90s, I was really grappling, quite painfully, with my own sense of identity. So I applied for an Asialink residency to Beijing. And my bold idea was to go and study calligraphy with a great master. Anyway, I won that fellowship, went to Beijing, found the great master, who told me all the things I wanted to know. That there was the good stroke and the bad stroke. The bad stroke is just all over the place, he said, but the good stroke is just this. It is precise and it is beautiful. And I was lapping all of this up, and I couldn't wait to get back to my studio, and I got all my materials, and I started to grind the ink and was having what I felt was a great time.
And I started to do his instructions, which were very repetitive, stroke after stroke, after stroke. And generally, I really enjoyed that process of repetition. But the more I did it, this really fierce voice inside of me said, no, don't do this. Which shocked me, quite frankly, because I'd won this fellowship and I was supposed to be studying calligraphy for a number of months in Beijing.
And that fierce voice just said, no, this is the wrong thing. So instead, what I ended up doing was doing all these splashes, I'd ground up pints, gallons and gallons of ink. So I was just tossing it about. Anyway, that felt really authentic, and so I started painting like that. When I got back to Australia, I read an article, by Norman Bryson, I think it was Painting in the Expanded Field, and in it he referenced flung ink painting, which was an ancient Chinese practice where monks would meditate for a short time, take up a flask of ink, and then splash it on silk or rice paper, and that mark was absolutely understood that the whole universe came into being, to create that mark.
Everything in existence comes together to make that moment. And when I read that, I realised why that was true for me. And that then started to develop this whole new practice, which I then transformed into flung bronze.
I love the story of the Net of Indra, which is a Buddhist story about the universe. And in this story, the universe is this infinite net. And at the ties of the strings of the net, is this perfect jewel, and it is perfect because it reflects and absorbs the light of every other jewel in the universe. So its beauty is because it's connected to everything.
And so that story is, a kind of parable of what it is to be in the world. So all phenomena are those individual jewels in the net. So each bush, each tree, each bird, each individual life, each person is a jewel in that net. So we owe our existence and our life to everything else. So that's the meaning of the flung bronze.
When I take up that ladle full of molten bronze at 1200 degrees centigrade and splash it on to the foundry floor, it's not me creating that mark, but everything in the universe in this moment, coming through me to make that mark. I have to get out of the way because quite seriously, it would be very dangerous if I tried to intervene in any conscious way.
