Artist Statement: Any news of La Pérouse? 2005 (catalogue English)

The lure of exploration

Overwhelming feelings must have driven men to leave the relative safety of home to explore unknown stretches of ocean and land. If few boarded ship in search of a better life in the navy, many would have been 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 afield that unexplored regions no longer struck fear into the hearts and minds of explorers. More than two centuries later, our perception links all these points of history and we recognise the world as a much smaller place.

Rediscovering Lapérouse

Through my work I rediscover Lapérouse. I re-establish a lost contact, an exchange, reviving original documents housed at the Mitchell Library in Australia and the Bibliothèque Mazarine in France. It’s as if I have cast a glance which 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 provides me with a double entendre: I relive his relationship with this country 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.

And what could we have found in common, Lapérouse and I, to fascinate us in this strange landscape? Is it that unique blue of the eucalyptus leaves, the trees’ camouflage for the multicolored lorikeets? The twisted stems and trunks of Australian plants, the grass tree with pieces of its trunk looking like the shell of an insect? The casuarinas so feminine when they flower, the banksias so gracious in their ruggedness? Or, when touching a shell, finding each section transposed as a hieroglyph, creating a series of narrative forms?

It is unfortunate that Duché de Vancy, Blondela and Prevost, the artists accompanying Lapérouse to Australia, left no documents relating to their encounter with Australia. Left to speculate as to their reactions, I am sure they would have been as captivated as I am, remembering my arrival in this country and the wonder I experienced then — and now — at such unique landscapes.

Nathalie Hartog-Gautier