s a c r e d p a l i m p s e s t
In Simon Buttonshaw’s ‘Sacred Palimpsest’ project, Lorne Point itself is the artist.
Simon moves all over the rocks, laying tarps and making drawings onto them. The images upon them are non-figurative, amorphic and enigmatic: marks that Simon calls ‘theolithics’ – from the Greek theos = the sacred heart of being, and lithic = stone. Something like ‘the sacred from the stone’.
What is it that has occurred in this process of mark-making? The marks are not inscribing (writing onto) but describing (writing off, or about). They’re palimpsests. A veil has been placed over the ancient rock, obscuring sight and other rational sensory input, and leaving only feeling as the artist’s guide. Gravity, weight, the enormous permanent mass of the rock is left undisturbed, and something ethereal lifts effortlessly away from it. Massive weight has been converted into weightless memory: the rock can speak to us now in a way that is entirely new.
This notion of bearing witness to unseen, unspoken things is a lifetime pursuit for Simon, who uses daily journals to record the silent passage of time over the sea. More recently, this practice has drawn in upon the life that is hidden in stones, their roles as repositories of time and geological memory. The tiniest flecks and lines under the summer feet of a child may be remnants of the sundering of Gondwanaland into vast continents.
Simon’s work requires an active engagement for the viewer, an unhitching of the conscious mind. In visual terms, there is no simple product to deliver here. Hands - scuttling crab-like over the surface of the rock - are feeling the textures, reading a tactile history and making marks in response. Lifting them off, they become a record, a memory.
The rock, born in fire and almost immune to time, meets the ephemeral life of the passing human for just a moment: eye to eye, unburdened by gravity or adamance. What it says in that instant, having witnessed all the colossal depth of geological time, is perfectly unique to each separate encounter. It is entirely up to the individual viewer.
The drawings are mounted onto a frame with rope that is hitched to create a kind of moiré pattern creating a vibrating aura around each piece, celebrating a heightened state of consciousness and focus. These framed images (memories) are placed in situ throughout the gardens of Bells Beach Yoga Shala, responding to each location with either a vertical, lateral or horizontal orientation.
The Yoga Shala brings a whole new context to the work, one that is inward looking and contemplative, held in the embrace of the wonderful garden that encircles the Shala.
- Jock Serong
Prints available in the store.