These works are studies and sketches using watercolour and drawing media. Painting with watercolour is a private form of visual mediation for me. Such a beautiful yet tricky medium, full of surprises!

Exhibition entry for Postcodes from the Edge Exhibition, Wollongong City Gallery 2018

The memory of the past can be driven by the desire to make it conform to our perceptions of the future, causing us to alter, invent and fabricate reality as we reconstruct it (David Lowenthal). By digitally compositing photographic fragments collected from natural environments that have changed significantly in my lifetime, my artwork conjures a kind of remediation of the natural world, and calls in a return to a sublime, pristine, primordial, planet.

I photographed this series of images whilst ‘exercising’ in isolation during the NSW COVID Lockdown. Photographing the surf zone at Surf Beach, Kiama and Werri Beach, Gerringong, during two East Coast Lows*, brought to mind the metaphorical relationship between the extreme weather event and the turbulent and unsettling times we were all experiencing at the time. Being out in the storm pulled me out of the isolation numbness I had been experiencing and activated all of my senses. It felt like I was standing in a Romanticist painting of the 19th Century (where nature is glorified and themes of solitude are punctuated by intense emotional drama).

As the peak of the storm subsided, the sun broke through, casting a sultry redemptive light across the ocean and sky. I caught glimpses of the horizon.

* An ‘East Coast Low’ is an intense low pressure weather system that occurs off the east coast of Australia and brings storm surges, damaging winds, heavy surf and torrential rainfall to the coast.

“The edge of the sea is a strange and beautiful place. All through the long history of Earth it has been an area of unrest where waves have broken heavily against the land, where the tides have pressed forward over the continents, receded, and then returned… The shore has a dual nature, changing with the swing of the tides, belonging now to the land, now to the sea…

And so in my mind’s eye these coastal forms merge and blend in shifting, kaleidoscopic pattern in which there is no finality, no ultimate and fixed reality – earth becoming fluid as the sea itself.”

 Rachel Carson, 1955

Intertidal

The intertidal zone on the edge of the sea is an ephemeral place. At ebb tide, creatures, plants, shells and rocks settle in rock pools. Sculpted by nature, these arrangements can take on surprising but elusive forms -  soon to be washed away by the flood of the next incoming tide.

These photographs are from a series that I have taken of rock pools along the rock shelf near where I live on the South East Coast of Australia.

‘Intertidal’ captures the fluid nature of working in the intertidal zone - from my perspective and practice as an artist and photographer: it encapsulates the dynamics of earth, sea, self.

Kaleidoscope is an ongoing project, first started in 2005, when I revisited my family's property, Wootoona, outside of Young, NSW. The images revisit the multiple-perspective viewpoint of a child in motion and at play in the undulating landscape of the wheat-sheep grazing farm which had been established by my ancestors in the late 1800s.

Photographic images by Diane Goodman Copyright 2016

Maps are social constructions of the world. J. B. Harley

Mapping traverses boundaries, re-defines and re-describes space and time.

In these works, the act of photographically mapping a site, a place, or a life attempts to "make the complex accessible, the hidden visible, the unnameable, mappable"- Janet Abrams and Peter Hall.

DIANE GOODMAN

Series of artworks: Cascades Female Factory

Archival inkjet prints

Artist Statement

The site of the Cascades Female Factory in Hobart sits in the cold shadow of Mount Wellington and resonates with the stories of thousands of Scottish, English and Irish convict women and children, transported there, from 1803 to 1853.

Mostly young women of childbearing age, they were incarcerated in a deplorable physical environment encompassing a system of stone walled ‘yards’, to which each was designated according to her reformation ‘class’. Many women and children died in this place, due to the wretched conditions, lack of adequate food and hygiene, and overcrowding.

Although a site of exile, suffering and terror, the Female Factory was also a place where women grasped any available opportunity to grow and nurture friendships, tell stories, sing and dance. A sense of unity and comradeship developed in places such as the ‘Washing Yard’ and the more feisty ‘criminal class’ rallied support as they challenged and contested the intolerable conditions, on behalf of all the women.

'Whitewashed' and ‘Emancipation’ are digital photographic reconstructions comprising a multitude of mapped photographic fragments I captured whilst visiting the Cascades Female Factory site at Hobart, in January 2017.

The aprons, bonnets and petticoats are artifacts from Yard 4, once laboriously scrubbed clean by convict women, now flying freely in the sunshine. The complex post-capture processes that I develop help me to understand the past and make the hidden visible. Through the making process, I feel a sense of empathy and unity with the diverse group of women who lived, worked and died at Cascades.

First-World Museums house cultural artefacts and relics from antiquity – treasure that belongs to the histories of ‘others’. The ‘presence’ series was inspired by a recent visit to France and its cultural museums and galleries. In these photographic montages, I have playfully installed ‘western’ sculptural icons in foreign ruinous environments. The series is inspired by notions of looting, relocation, heritage and cultural economies.

These works are a reading of the Bundanon cultural landscape - the result of a year long historical and personal analysis.

Relationships between perceived dual forces are visually explored in works which recognise associations between: settler and country; clearing and bush; introduced species and native; home and habitat; past and present; visible and invisible; and light and shadow.

Paphos Theatre in Cyprus is an ancient Graeco-Roman theatre, a site of archaeological excavation. I worked as a member of the USyd excavation team and a member of the UOW Sonic Architectures Project in 2006. I mapped the theatre over two days using my digital camera whilst stepping over the entire site - capturing 2187 images. The Surveyors on site used their theodolite to align my lens to the ancient orthogonal grid. The map was composited in Photoshop and can be printed to a width of 30m in full resolution.

Images provided by Diane Goodman. All rights reserved.

Each of the 'Illuminations' images were created by layering up to 50 images from a specific row of images composited for the Paphos Theatre map. The vertical mapping in Photoshop signifies the stratigraphy of an archaeological site, a sequential layering of deposits embedded in the earth of the site. Systematic excavation and analysis of the stratigraphy is used as evidence by which archaeologists interpret the human use of the site over time. In 'Illuminations', fragments and artefacts float to the surface of the 'stratigraphy' of the Photoshop stack of layers, referencing the revelation of archaeological finds on site.

Images provided by Diane Goodman. All rights reserved.