Indian Ocean Drive, as the name suggests, is a tourist route that tracks up the west coast of Australia heading north from Perth. It carries campervans, caravans, four wheel drives, tourists, travelers and grey nomads; I think of it as a long, unwinding transition from work to rest. The rhythm of the white road marking lines passing by is punctuated by pauses at rest stops looking out to the Indian Ocean; moments of momentary stillness in the mobile world of campervans and caravans.
Bitumen Landscape (Indian Ocean Drive) records 18 pauses on the journey north through collecting rubbings of the road marking lines found at rest stops. The 1:1 scale rubbings emerge through a coat of dusty black gesso, under which glimpses of the 1: 100,000 scale maps of the landscape can be seen. There is a slippage in scale between the physical encounter with the landscape and the mapped version of the space, and similarly there’s a dichotomy in the marks that denote the landscape - the rubbed marks bear evidence of the fierce south westerly winds, the intermittent rain and the rough road base surfaces that puncture and bruise the paper, whereas the mapped marks remain unwaveringly stable.
This work emerges from a larger body of work that considers the embodied experience of mobility, and more recently its counterpart stillness. The indexical mature of rubbing (or frottage) grounds the work in a particular place, or on a surface, where, for a moment in time, despite the wind or rain, things stay still. This series of works include 1:1 scale rubbings of airplanes in the Arizona Desert, a cruise ship gangway, a ship’s rudder and a 30-meter round-the-world rubbing.