2019. Afterstorm

Domain House, Royal Botanical Gardens

Scatter 2 (Santa Cruz), 2016, is a large (87 cms x 290 cms), panoramic, co-authored 2016 art work by Lyndell Brown/Charles Green and Jon Cattapan that was made together over many months in 2016, sending the work back and forwards across the two studios. The underlying image is Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili (the scene of a 1991 Timor-Leste massacre of students by Indonesian military). This is a panoramic photograph stitched digitally from multiple photos that Brown and Green took at the cemetery when all three artists visited Timor-Leste in 2014 for fieldwork to gather images.

The photograph was ink-jet printed onto transparent Duraclear film mounted on Perspex. Light radiates through the work like a contemporary photographic update of stained glass. It was then delicately overpainted in oil paint with images, semi-abstract (at top, a curtain of red; right, the tracery of memorial architecture over two foreground grave-stones) and figurative (left, an intricate, detailed, painted pyramid of images including Saint Jerome and the crouching figure of Muhamed Haneef, an Indian doctor wrongly accused of terrorism by the Australian government in 2007). Its horizontal layout of images in timelines is like a cartoon strip or even the Bayeux tapestry (c. 1070, depicting the Norman Conquest). The work combines digital photography, new methods of digital printing onto transparent substrates, and layers of over-painting in oils and acrylic; it also combines documentary photography and painting. Lyndell Brown/Charles Green and Jon Cattapan have made collaborative works since 2011 that stand separate to and alongside their own individual productions, yet which have enabled the artists to explore new ideas and methods together over a long period of time as a result of their shared fieldwork at locations across Asia. They see their collaboration both as research and as an extension of drawing. The three artists’ works made together have been included in curated exhibitions several times and have entered public and private collections.

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