Audio Transcript
I’m BJ Murphy. I am a Jinibara artist, I guess a contemporary artist. The older I get and the more knowledge I gain you know from my journey of finding myself I guess as an artist I’m starting to really step back and go back to the old ways.
You know instead of using sandpaper to sand clapsticks or digeridoos or whatever artifact it is I’m making, I’m trying to utilise stuff from nature so using Sandpaper Fig. Instead of using the acrylic paints I’m stepping back and you know, using those natural earth pigments and ochre. Seeing the older way coming back I think you can appreciate the piece a bit more. My photography side in my practice has always been, ah it’s going to sound weird, but like the hobby. So to win the award for the photo piece it was pretty special.
We were travelling through Bellthorpe Range forestry and I’d taken our friend Jo Driessens out there she’s a photographer and she was capturing some beautiful shots of the Bunya tress out there and we came across a big tree stump and it’s got the little springboard grooves cut into it and I heard one of the Rangers refer to it as “an original”. And I was telling Jo and Lib this story about it and then it just really happened organically and unfolded right there in the moment and I was like ‘oh what if we put an original custodian in an original tree’ you know.
There’s a few things in this photograph, in this piece, that mean a lot to me. To some people it’s just art and it’s a photo but to me there’s so much story behind it, so you know, not just the story about you know the ranger and what it’s called and me being an original custodian, but the fact of logging our forestries, you know the time that it happened around 1840 that’s when they started colonising you know our traditional area up here, the fact that it’s sort of a portrait but it’s also a landscape in the one image and then also bush regen and revegetation in the background with all the younger tress growing up. So there’s many layers to that image and yeah when you start unpacking them all and you notice other things, sometimes I still look at it and notice something different about it you know and it’s just I don’t know, it was just one of those images and it was just captured at the right time and you can just get so much from that one photo it’s just beautiful yeah we loved it.