Hartog-Gautier, Nathalie. Encounter – Journey of discovery, Lapérouse Museum, 2005-6, ill. (catalogue)

Overwhelming feelings must have driven men to leave the relative safety of their homes to explore unknown stretches of ocean and land. Many boarded ships in search of a better life in the navy, but there would have been a few motivated by intellectual curiosity as these voyages provided remarkable opportunities for scientific discovery, unique experiences, personal challenges and reflection. It was through contact with other cultures that European man came to better understand the world and his own position within it. By the Age of Enlightenment the edge of the known world had been pushed so far a field that unexplored regions no longer struck fear into the hearts and minds of explorers. More than two centuries later, we recognise the world as a much smaller place.

Through my work I rediscover Lapérouse, it’s as if I cast a glance that intersects with his at a particular point on the globe. Researching his voyage has taken me on a journey of my own. Sensing his emotions provided me with a double entendre: I relive his relationship with Australia and examine my own. In a dreamlike state between imagination and reality I recreate and reinvent, entering a moment Danish writer, Karen Blixen, describes as beyond time.

What could we have found in common, Lapérouse and I, to fascinate us both in this strange Australian landscape? Is it that unique blue of the Eucalyptus leaves, camouflage for the multicoloured lorikeets? The twisted stems and trunks of Australian plants, the Banksia so gracious in its ruggedness? The Grass Tree with pieces of its trunk looking like the shell of an insect? The Casuarina so feminine when it flowers?

During the process of researching, I too was an explorer, looking, sensing a plant, a shell, going through a journey, a process of layering observations and information. Each artwork reminiscent of a cartouche with hieroglyphic marks is a series of transpositions of what I am and what I see,  the past and the present represented by two works for each study. Emotions and frustrations are encountered during an artistic 'journey'. By aiming to navigate through discarded works one hopes to have made progress towards a destination, a completed piece. However when wandering and interpreting the spiral of history it soon becomes evident that there are never ending possibilities of communicating history through different modes of artistic expression. My artwork is therefore a log, a personal interpretation of my graphic adventures in Lapérouse's historical journey.