Blue Mountains Artwork 1994-2005 | Victoria King, artist and writer

Blue Mountains, New South Wales, Australia 1994 - 2005

At the end of December 1993, I took a leave of absence from teaching painting at John Moores University in Liverpool and went to Australia for a holiday. I had impetuously fallen in love with an Australian whom I met at a 3-month Tibetan Buddhist retreat in France that summer. I never intended to stay, but he refused to live in England and I foolishly persisted in thinking I could change his mind. We lived for twelve years in a house I bought on three acres adjoining the Blue Mountains National Park. Exotic flowers were always in bloom in the garden, mist hung in the valleys like in a Japanese screen, and extraordinary wildlife animated the land with colour, song, and movement. I felt surrounded by an immense presence. The vast space and intimate diversity were what I had been trying to convey in my English painting for many years. Yet I found it difficult to paint the particularity of the stark beauty surrounding me. I felt homesick for my son and life in England but I persisted in my new relationship despite it being problematic. It was doomed to fail. I had given up too much to be with him and felt no sense of belonging or sense of place. I was a gardener in a drought-ridden land where the activity seemed not only futile but inappropriate.

1998 was a momentous year. I was diagnosed with a rare form of ovarian cancer which led to massive surgery and six months of chemotherapy. That same year a chance meeting with Stolen Generation Aboriginal artist Barbara Weir resulted in her asking me to record her stories. I volunteered to transcribe her stories and those of twelve other Anmatyerre and Alyawarre women artists at the remote Aboriginal outstation of Utopia in the country's arid, red centre. The women were generous and kind to me, and each time I returned to my home and studio in the Blue Mountains, I erased my work so as not to appropriate the appearance of Aboriginal artists' artworks. I often imprinted pigments from one surface to another in an attempt to find an appropriate gesture in an appropriated land. I exhibited my hard-won paintings along with installations of sandstone, plaster, and rusted metal I found on my land in solo exhibitions each year in galleries in the Blue Mountains and in Sydney. In 2000, I received a scholarship from the University of New South Wales in Sydney to research issues of place and displacement, and in 2005 was awarded a PhD for my thesis Art of Place and Displacement: Embodied Perception and the Haptic Ground.