Ian Waldron and Katrina Chapman

Into the woods series

Into the woods is an exciting 2013 collection of mixed media works including quirky 3D dioramas – in collaboration with Katrina Chapman – alongside painted photographic works revealing a fresh, almost surrealist, perspective of an Indigenous landscape. In the accompanying catalogue essay, Katrina Chapman writes: Ian Waldron’s eighth major solo exhibition, ‘Into the woods’ is about mystery, not the solving of it, but a celebration of how embracing it enriches our lives as nothing else can. The woods serve as an analogy for the metaphysical world, represented visually as the scrub on Waldron’s country.

In this work we are shown Waldron being drawn into the scrub. The landscape is realistic but somehow not real, dream-like and strange. To what is he being drawn, what does he see in the landscape that we cannot? The use of the vibrant blue of Waldron’s Delta Downs shirt and repeated on the box, serves not only as a striking visual effect, but also and more significantly, as a link between the contemporary everyday and the sacred in the artist’s culture. For Kurtjar people the continuing physical link with the land has been cemented by their role in the cattle industry. Owning a large cattle station which all Kurtjar people are stakeholders in and which is managed and staffed by Kurtjar and neighbouring language groups means that access to country is unquestioned and unchallenged.