Collaboration in the Blue Mountains - Brianna and Luke Peterson

Below are two variations of the collaboration with Brianna, rendered from the indeterminate composition.

Katoomba, Blue Mountains
13-17th June 2013

It is not easy to convey the experience of spending time with Brianna and her husband Luke. There is much conversation, laughter, joy, good food, wine and friendship shared, and out of all the trips I feel this was less about what we did, though what we did was also rich and beautiful. In this place, serene and clear by day, dark winds howled at night.
Looking again upon that time, it seemed more about the humility of these two people and the life they shared. Not a quiet, shy humility, but an extroverted and joyful one - having understood much and discarded any pretense about it, and just gotten back to what's essential to them.

Together we went into the forest down in the valley by the Three Sisters, where Brianna interviewed Luke - a professional tree-lopper - among the trees and streams, asking him about his relationship to the forest. Much of his response is featured in this piece. I don't feel to say too much else about this - it's the kind of place where you don't feel like speaking.

Logan Brae Orchard

As we were shown around this orchard, the owner told us about how he was pulling out many of the old apple trees - which were all of the same variety, a monoculture - and that he was planting new varieties of trees. He explained how more bees would be more attracted to a more diverse culture, and so would more readily travel throughout the orchard, helping to pollinate as they went.

I felt great resonance with this. Everyone I'd been visiting was on their own creative journey, and in many ways, my role has been like a bee going from flower to flower, passing the ideas, inspiration, and conversation from one person to the next while also collecting nectar and pollen - fuel for my own creative hive. It was as if my own work was humbled in the light of this amazing communication happening between the beautiful and inspiring women with whom I've been traveling.

Each person I've had creative interactions with, in their own way, has brought  me again to the idea of the Glass Bead Game with which I began this journey - a kind of effortless play with artifacts of living creativity, that we allow to transform or dissipate as we weave through these spaces of intimate philosophical and aesthetic sharing.

Hargraves Lookout

We went to Hargraves Lookout together, under a deep ink-blue sky and a fulsome garden of stars, and I made this piece with hands numb from cold, and wrapped in layers of clothes and blankets. Afterwards, the three of us lay together talking up at the stars for as long as the cold would allow.

Brianna's Piece

In her work creating radio documentaries, Brianna said that she gets an image in her mind of how a piece needs to be before she starts it, and that guides her creative process - so when we started creating raw materials for our collaboration she was able to work in this way; with a vision for how she wanted certain sounds to be.
It's curious that with Brianna being the most extroverted of all the collaborators in this project, her piece ended up being the most ambient and brooding, like the night winds here in the mountains.