< PASTORAL
BLUE FLOWERS
State Forest | Christmas Hills | Tasmania | Australia
Christmas Hills: Blue Flowers | Scott Bennett | 2013 | Digital image | Collection the artist
Artist Statement
Not only the result, but the road to it also, is a part of truth. The investigation of truth must itself be true, true investigation is unfolded truth, the disjuncted members of which unite in the result (Sergei Eisenstein)
I’d spent many hours poring over aerial images of Tasmania, on and off for several years. I was anxious about the visible threat to the diminishing wilderness.
I was astonished, when I chanced one day, to view a forest in negative. Artificial structures stood out, strongly contrasted, in shades of blue, against the silver-white of the wilderness. The dark wilds appeared as pure as snow when inverted.
The scene looked like a stained microscope slide, fluorescing under ultraviolet light (A black light or Wood’s lamp!), the specimen dyed blue to enhance visualisation.
The Chinoiserie style resembles blue and white porcelain wares (Chinese: 青花; pinyin: qīng-huā; literally “Blue flowers”).
The barcode on the bottom right encodes a URL containing the coordinates of the site on a map, the location of the real place.
The place is Christmas Hills, in north-west Tasmania.
*Aerial image reproduced with kind permission of Geodata Services Branch, Information & Land Services Division, DPIPWE.
“It is myself I mean, in whom I know all the particulars of vice so grafted that, when they shall be opened, black Macbeth will seem as pure as snow, and the poor state esteem him as a lamb, being compared with my confineless harms.” Malcolm (Macbeth: Act 4, Scene 3)
I looked at this image today – now six years later – and thought it was time to invert it (Convert a photographic negative to a positive i.e. to print it!).