Willow Bowers - 2019

During the 1990s, I was an artist-in-residence at the University of Southern Indiana in the US. During that time, I travelled around a few universities in Indiana, giving guest lectures and talking with students about their work. At Indiana University in Indianapolis, I happened upon a large willow bower and met its maker, Patrick Dougherty. The memory of this chance encounter stayed with me. Back in Australia, many years later, I became involved in the celebration of the Black Gully Creek restoration adjacent to the New England Regional Art Museum in Armidale, NSW. In 2013 or so, I built some minor willow bowers from willow cut from Black Gully and from the dam at the back of the Mike O’Keefe Woodland Centre for the Black Gully Festival in that year. In collecting willow from the dam, I stepped from a floating willow pad, missed the bank and went up to my armpits in sticky mud. Cleaning myself off, I made the mental note that the mud felt very much like clay. This became pivotal later in using Black Gully clay for the Ephemera project in 2016.

Leading up to the 2019 Black Gully Festival, I embarked on a larger bower, cutting many trailer loads of willow from up and down Black Gully. With a few helpers, we embarked on the construction of a modest willow bower.