Lynette Smith is an artist living in Melbourne, drawing, writing, taking pictures, making things, thinking. During her residency at Plumwood Mountain, Lyn was working on a series of drawing-poems and photographs, inspired by ideas of consumption and the surprise loan of her grandfather’s old camera.

*Lynette Smith with the Zeiss Ikon Contina (Clancy Walker, 2024)*

I passed the foot of this mountain many times in my childhood and teenage years. Mostly on the way to Pebbly Beach to see the hungry kangaroos. It’s a geography I still don’t quite know, though I have been up to my knees in its darker muds and fallen over and up on its steeper sides. Its odours are familiar, especially the volatile air of the lower mountain and the smell of cool decomposition when you reach the tree ferns.

This time, I was here, by accident, with a partly formed purpose. One accident was to have my grandfather’s camera in my hands: a Zeiss Ikon Contina from the late 50s, which he may have used as a missionary in the highlands of Madagascar. Another accident was a drawing-poem I made a couple of years ago during lockdown: Mother-na, a hot decomposition of text.

The purpose was a triangle of thoughts about eating, speaking and burning, which have lurked around in my drawing, writing and other making for a few years. Worlds are made through speech. Worlds are consumed. It all goes in and out through the mouth. That is what the mouth is for.

I wanted to see what it would be like to draw and write in a place, which I was connected to in a passing way, but which was also the home of a philosopher who told herself and us (settlers) not to be so at home, not to be so comfortable.

The mountain fizzed with the indifference of the living. The racket of the cicadas. The clouds of winged termites. Crowds of crows in the treetops near the creek. The snakes I never saw. I would try to mimic the calls of the birds, but the only one I could manage was the voiceless trill of the wrens as they flew – which was the sound of their wings not their voices.

I took photos. The lever that winds film from one spool to the other in the old Contina didn’t quite work, so the light reflecting off things – bodies, leaves, droplets of water – distributed itself over more than one image. The mountain wouldn’t permit a landscape.

See more of Lynette’s work over on her website https://www.lynettesmith.com.au/ or her instagram @lynette_c_smith.

Lynette Smith: 4 - 14 November, 2024

Connor Tomas O’Brien: 16 - 21 July, 2024