All in Portraits
For the last couple of years I’ve been involved with an ambitious arts project called Reclaim the Void. It’s a bold cross-cultural project, born from Ngalia elders in Leonora, Western Australia, expressing their pain and grief at ‘those gaping mining holes left all over our country’. The idea was conceived to symbolically ‘seal’ one of the holes with an artwork expressing the story of country…
…Whilst the membership of the Kulin Men’s Shed might be small in number, the combined knowledge and passion for the town’s history that these blokes hold more than makes up for that…
Recently returned from a writers’ residency in the Blue Mountains, award-winning poet Renee Pettitt-Schipp was in need of publicity shots to accompany her next book. We got the ‘safe’ shots around her home and then went for a walk to the inlet near her home in Denmark WA. That’s where the magic happened :-)
For many years, Hazel supported victims of domestic violence as they escaped their situation and rebuilt their lives. Nowadays, she’s focussing more on the homeless. Once thought of as a problem in the big cities, homelessness happens everywhere. In August last year, Homeless Project Denmark found there was 181 homeless people between Cosy Corner and Walpole - you can guarantee the actual figure is higher. There's a small group of legends who work hard with Hazel to make a difference but they can't do it on their own. We can all help...
It was just a few weeks after the Denmark bushfires that I visited musician, artist and environmentalist James Gentle at home. It was a mix of good luck and James’s huge efforts that his house was not on the list of those lost in the fires. All that’s left of his caravan, however, is a patch of ash with melted metal and glass sculpted by intense heat.
Artist and visionary, Andre is the man who started the Denmark Arts markets, and indeed Denmark Arts itself. He flies under the radar most of the time these days, and I'm sure there's a lot of people here now who have no idea how much Andre shaped our little town. He's one of Denmark's original 'bloody hippies' and a bloody treasure.
I’ve photographed Andre many times over the years and have included some of my old favourites below the photos I took a few days ago.
