Adam Laerkesen Linnaeus's Dog
Nature has always informed my work, its
imagination offers endless possibilities.
After the birth of my son Matteo, I once again
thought about how nature shaped my childhood
imagination. Memory had a story to tell. I grew up
in the suburbs of Surfers Paradise, in a long, curved
street with houses that had no back fence but
instead opened onto a rambling park. A child could
not have asked for a better play ground, this
unmanicured park was a place of abandon until our
mother’s call for dinner.
A couple of years later (inexplicable to me at
the time), my parents decided to move to a ten acre
property in the middle of the bush that was a half
hour journey from our old house. Our new house
had a long winding dirt track that opened up to a
clearing at the top of the hill and there our house sat
surrounded by the bush.
As the weeks grew so too did my isolation,
friends came to visit and we played in a cubby
amongst the bamboo patch. I tried to get a sense of
belonging in this place, this landscape, but I always
felt those iron barks with their bleeding saps where
watching me. I became familiar with surrounding
bush, but I always knew that there was something
unfamiliar present also. To this day when I reflect
on my childhood in the bush it is still a mystery
why this feeling of the other and unease was so
strong. Was it the isolation? Was it the silence or
the noise? Was it that we were surrounded or that
whenever you stared out through the window the
bush always stared back?
As I think of that experience, of immersion in
the bush I have come to realize how it has shaped
my sculptural practice. The familiar and the
unfamiliar, mystery and the sense of other continue
to pique my imagination. The bush seeps into my
dreams where the collision and marriage of
opposites take place and there, visions manifest as
starting points in my work. This unexpected
combination asks the viewer to experience and
think in new and divergent ways allowing for the
possibility of the unconscious to manifest in my
work and give space for poetic possibilities and the
unfurling of the mysterious.
Living in the bush all those years ago, instilled
in me a desire to reveal forces of nature, “making
the invisible visible”. The end result is often
menacing and playful, dramatic and visceral,
familiar and unpredictable.
www.adamlaerkesen.com