In this work “National Life and Landscapes- Shearing Shed” I sent via email, each of the participants one of 24 digital tiles of a line image from a subject unknown to the recipients.

My fellow artists were asked to digitally render the tile in colour or texture using the paint bucket tool in the Paint application on their PC or similar.

When returned, all tiles were placed back in order and the outline restored. Participants then received a high res. digital file of the finished work to print, archive or do with whatever they saw fit. All the works in the “National Life and Landscapes" project are produced under the terms of Share Alike agreement of Creative Commons.

The conceptual rationale is to produce a work from diverse sources. This for me is exciting in itself, not the least because I cannot predict what the final work will look like. Other than as author of the process, only I know the original subject image. In this project I aim to dissolve some doubts I have about the following questions:

Ø Will the integrity of the original image survive?

Yes it did, it is still readable as an image of a shearing shed in the countryside.

Ø Or do we arrive at a whole new place?

Yes we do, the end result is a surprising interpretation that no one of us could have created

Ø What does the end result say about the self or group as arbiter of representation?

An integrated collaboration is equally capable of producing a representative visual statement as that of the single creative viewpoint. Providing the individual is acting freely of their own volition, with the preparedness to locate the result alongside others, then an exciting new matrix is possible equivalent to the focused energy of the solitary creative act. This is not new in theatre, but is not common in fine arts.

Ø And how might that speak poetically about our presence on this ancient planet and this point in time?

As the live-ers of our own lives, we carry the story of existence from our past into the future. We are each responsible for that. When called to act in good faith in community with others, we thread our story into the weave of the prayer mat of acceptance of who we are and of what we might become. This work of the larger project “National Life and Landscapes” is an image of a shearing shed, an image of country made heroic in Australian post-white settlement by song, poem and painting. The “National Life and Landscapes” version of the shearing shed is made by revealing what might be, from who this small community of 24 artists are, rather than what we thought we should be. Courageous in revealing rather than deferentially affirming.

I am highly excited by the result. A map of how our uniqueness represents the highest capacity for mutuality and connectedness with others.

As my vision adjusts to its community of voices, “National Life and Landscapes- Shearing Shed” still speaks to me well after I finished re-composing it. It’s a bit like those studio pieces that get started, are put aside, then picked up again, while over the same time several other works have started and finished in a single stream of creativity. And these slow moving works are often the most revealing, becoming the road less travelled, the one requiring more care and caution, not from danger, but because there is potentially more to miss.

The community of fellow travellers who contribute to the creation of the works in the “National Life and Landscapes” project are some of my friends who have shown faith and trust in my itinerant path as an artist, and to you all I offer my gratitude for this and other gestures of support.

I will publish for my own catalogue a Giclee limited edition of 25 on Canson Infinity Artist Canvas 390gsm, 24x36cm.

Please contact me if you are interested.

The “National Life and Landscapes” project are collaborative works.

Your participation is invited under the Share Alike terms of Creative Commons – “This licence lets others distribute, remix and build upon the work, even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit the original creator/s (and any other nominated parties) and license any new creations based on the work under the same terms. All new derivative works will carry the same licence, so will also allow commercial use. In other words, you agree to share your materials with others, if they will share their new works in return. This licence is often compared to the free software licences, known as ‘copyleft.’”

Court House was produced by participants at a talk I gave on conceptual aesthetics at Western Plains Cultural Centre in July 2011

This work was produced as a collaborative digital exercise with students in my Digital Graphics Tvet Class at the Lincoln Education and Training Unit at Orana Juvenile Justice. Most of these boys are aboriginal and are sentenced from courts in the Western Region of New South Wales.

I gave the team an archive of cloud photographs and asked that they cut, paste and edit to create the perfect cloud. Using skills delivered in the learning sessions I asked that they then make digitally interpretive changes to the theme of You, Me and Us as three versions of their perfect cloud. These thematic cloud images were then shared to a central accessible folder.

The final tiles used in the poster were retrieved from the pool of images by the boys and negotiated to create the final image. The work references the Cloud series work of Michael Riley, and addressed the theme of the 2011 NSW Reconciliation Schools Challenge of You, Me and Us.

Our poster won first prize in the years 9-10 category, with each of the six boys winning a gift pack of NSW Reconciliation Council and FM Triple J merchandise. The award ceremony and exhibition was held at the Australian Museum from 27 May- 5 June 2011.

“I found the work very engaging. It abstracted the concept of You, Me, Us, into a dimension that allowed the audience to engage with it according to one's own background, thus it was a very inclusive statement. To me it sang loudly the words, 'same, different' --- in that, it highlighted alikeness and at the same time difference and yet together the whole was complete. It was through the wholeness that the work held together so well”.

Kerrie Murphy, Co-Chairperson (Non-Indigenous) of the NSW Reconciliation Council

You, Me, Us is an archival digital print on Hahnemuhle matt fine art smooth photo rag 308 gsm 60 x 84cm

"National Life and Landscapes" is a collaborative project that in part challenges notions of authorship. The Share Alike agreement offers in part- "Your creative input will entitle you to free and open use of the final image. Jack Randell will retain property rights for sale of the works. This clearance will be archived with images and other material related to the project. Information supplied will not be made public."

Re-use attribution should read “Jack Randell and friends, a collaborative artwork”.

I make note of my property rights in this clearance so that I can traffic the works in the public domain unencumbered. This maintains participants privacy, and invites critical scrutiny on the same basis as other works from the Fishdog studio.

"Collins Avenue" was produced with the participation of volunteers and community members during the painting of the Apollo House Mural 2011. Apollo House is a community centre in a disadvantaged area of East Dubbo.

My work has almost always explored the energies generated by the association of hot and cool signifiers. Impetuous behaviours like social violence or recklessness precipitate a sense of intrigue brought about by the momentary suspension of belief- is this really happening? There is a collision of the impetuousness as hot action, and my feigned indifference which is cool.

In most cases the visual elements I employ in my pictures are more subtle, but always there seems to be the comparison between a subjective and an objective gesture. These coded positions become relationally dialectical, once delivered into the theatre of a picture. This binary sets up an oscillation like sub-atomic particles moving between the states of mass and energy. The experience shifts away from the figurative elements of the work toward a reflective transcendence, referencing directly the creative impulse. Finally not so much about the subject elements of the work.

The hot and cold signals are also a metaphor at a personal level for my experience of deep despair at human behaviour, in terms of social and environmental degradation, counterbalanced in my defence against succumbing to that despair by a resultant sense of personal entitlement. Entitlement being the hot, subjective knee-jerk reaction, and despair being the cold lurking vacuum. And it is my experience of the creative impulse that is the cure for the potential dangers of these personal and social ailments.

This is subject matter of worth.

The magic of the reality of difference. Fish. Dog. Wood.

FishDogWood

archival digital print edition of 8.
20x32cm image, 35x46cm paper.
Canson Infinity, BFK Rives, 310gsm.

1 of artists proof 25.5x41cm

There are 3 prints left of this edition. One framed at $330, unframed $200.

Package & Freight unframed prints $11 Australia, $22 International.
Framed $22 Australia, $44 International

A signed edition of 15 DVDs of Mnemosyne was released while I was resident at Thirning Villa in Ashfield, Sydney in 2010. This edition sold well over the period of 3 months through 3 exhibitions at $22. There remains 6 units left in the stockroom.

The video/paintings compilation disc titled Jack Randell features 5 video/painting works shown at CarriageWorks in 2008. Two of these artworks William Street- Wind,Sun,Time 2008 and Boat Harbour- Kurnell 2008 were created while resident at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and The Gunnery, Artspace, Sydney. This DVD was produced at Metro Screen in Sydney. From a signed edition of 33, there are 9 remaining of this 5 video/painting compilation at $33.

Should you be interested in these DVDs or any other works from the studio stockroom, please email enquiries(at)fishdog.com.au

Chiyogami Rabbit is a preparatory work for Rabbit (Lights at Rail Crossing) from the exhibition This Way at Gaffa, Clarence Street, Sydney in 2010. I found this small sketch when I was packing up the studio materials needed for my Thirning Villa residency at Ashfield in Sydney. My friends Lea and Ken Tucker saw it and encouraged me to work the subject up, which I did but it didn't make the Gaffa show. I hung it in the Lazy River exhibition at Dubbo and it sold pronto on opening night. Ken and Lea bought one of the Exist prints (Goodbye Good World) in the first Thirning Villa show.

Jack Randell's show, This Way, (August 12-24 Gaffa Gallery, Sydney) plots a course through the outback that in its memory-like layering of signs and images locates points of departure in a journey rather than arrival. The show is comprised of a series of square paintings of roadside signs and a video work of projected images on a woman's torso. Within each work individually and between the works in the series there is a syncopation between the key images: the background, the sign and that which is projected onto them. The point of departure from the signs and the immediate 'Australian-ness' is into a projected narrative, an accelerated reality that draws on the idea of the journey as both subject and process. The very nuts-and-bolts of Randell's images are taken from driving long distances alone and at high-speeds through the country. We can elaborate here ideas of the artist driving, seeing signs having thoughts and painting that memory. It's a suitably simple explanation and it ties itself to what Randell describes as the 'randomness of images, the inconsequence, that's how life rolls out. Sometimes there's meaning and sometimes not, or there is but we just don't see it.' Djon Mundine takes us a little further than this explanation through the term 'vernacular landscape'. The works engage with a set of complex cultural arrangements that, seemingly so easily read, have the inaudible dog-whistles of a far deeper narrative than that of a No Frill's black pepper box layered on a train-crossing sign.

http://www.rococoproductions.com/500/500_009.html

Black Pepper is available from the stockroom. $550 framed + package and freight $44 Aust, $88 International

Djon Mundine takes us a little further than this explanation through the term 'vernacular landscape'. The works engage with a set of complex cultural arrangements that, seemingly so easily read, have the inaudible dog-whistles of a far deeper narrative than that of a No Frill's black pepper box layered on a train-crossing sign (Black Pepper 2010, acrylic polymers on board, 60x60cm). It speaks of a post- colonial environment and the task of identifying the artist's 'affinity with this place' when travelling through it. He says it's a different affinity to an Indigenous sense of place or to a tourist's, having seen this for the first time. As Jack describes a working class country upbringing in Dubbo and returning to indigenous communities as an artist and teacher, through the big rolling skies and tremendous scenery, 'your mind going to incredible places' I get an insight into the artist that rhymes with the perhaps naff aphorism 'we are all tourists or visitors', somewhere to some extent no matter how many times you've worn the track.

The journey through 'this place', through the animal, earthy bacchanal of scrubby bush and thundering clouds sits both with and against the simple geometry of the sings seen along the way. The rhyme here is not of a naff aphorism but an ongoing process, an expedition into one's self and the place they inhabit, and the people that remain in this land.

http://www.rococoproductions.com/500/500_009.html

The Biludurang Mural (“Biladurang” is Wiradjuri for platypus) is a collaborative project. The digital graphics students of Lincoln Education and Training Unit, Orana Juvenile Justice Centre, negotiated the design between themselves from a pool of ideas, with assistance and guidance from artists Allan Shillingsworth and myself. Allan contributed some traditional designs and came up with a unique interpretation in dots of the Taronga Western Plains Zoo concourse. The painting process has been simplified by careful design work, enabling a range of skilled and unskilled people to participate. From a core group of six students, over twenty people contributed to the production of the mural. The process of forming an idea, generating a vision, making the vision substantial as a design and bringing that design into reality is what artists do. As an artist I am thrilled to guide this process in a group of young men. We have all learnt more than the acquired technical skills. We have formed individual and shared respect for our subject, biladurang, the platypus, as well as a new respect for the creative process. With the great courtesy of Taronga Western Plains Zoo providing a high profile public location for the mural, and the support of our other partners, Lincoln Education and Training Unit, TAFE Western, River Smart and Paul Kirk we have added a new component to the cultural asset of our community.

Many thanks to all involved.