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between inside and outside?’ 1 If finding the ‘bridge’, which allows the artist ‘to say more than nature’ with fewer means, 2 involves the subtlest feedback between formal study, eye–hand coordination and kinaesthetic memory and disposition, how is a migrant artist going to find that ‘bridge’: hollowed out, the somatic imprint of earlier landscapes dismissed as foreign and the character of the outer landscape utterly unfamiliar, is the figure of the ‘bridge’ even
identifiable context or conversation and on this account readily recruited to new contexts and applications. In my experience, the migrant artist's encounters are similarly promiscuous. It would be difficult to stratify the different genres in which I have played: radio art did not yield to typographical engravings in public places; writing and directing performance works in and outside the theatre did not lay the foundations of a later discovery of my true metier in cross-cultural urban design. A critic once described my interests as polyhedral, referring to the coexistence
insists, is a positive development. At intervals he has returned to his native Italy – born in Melbourne, he confronted his parents’ experience when he travelled to where they had come from. Different from the colonial avatars and the Australian migrant artists of my generation, his view of my story renders it curiously nebulous – as if the ‘toxic relationship’, to adapt Marcia Langton's phrase for the non-relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, which locks the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ country in a mutual basilisk stare could be shattered simply by
perhaps the earliest layer of the book you are reading now, are other paths taken and not taken. But it is an allusion to migrant artist Victor Litherland, a list of paintings I planned to discuss in a catalogue essay, 32 that pulls together these threads: I was impressed by the way his many views of the main road snaking through the little mid-Victorian town of Creswick (where he lived) seemed to frame a void; stuck on to the edges of his compositions were stamp-sized human figures, immobile, puppet-like; a solitary