Towards a peripatetic practice

Towards a peripatetic practice: negotiating journey through painting investigates painting as a
way of comprehending lived experience of travel. The project develops from curiosity about
journeys and their potential for bringing the artist into encounters with the world, and
proximate to its issues and concerns. Aims of the project focused on peripatetic practice as a
means of redirecting a personal experience of rootlessness towards connecting with others, and
considering and communicating the complexity of cross-cultural experience through painting.
Objectives as such were to investigate through practice the function and form of peripatetic
painting, and to document this through film and writing.
The study acknowledges travel as an ancient way of knowing the world and takes inspiration
from the paradigm of the nomadic storyteller as exemplified in the Bengali tradition of Patuya
Sangit (scroll performance). With a sense of the capacity for painting to provide spaces of
connection and empathy, the study draws on the writing of John Berger and Suzi Gablik,
exploring a confluence of ideas about the evolving social role of the artist. Key influences are
historic and contemporary peripatetic creative practices, which include the writer Freya Stark,
the colonial painter William Simpson, and the artists Phil Smith and John Wolseley. The project
also incorporates methodological approaches which borrow from anthropology, situating the
artist as observer, participant, and ultimately, agent. Practice in this context is immersive, and
takes on social, interactive dimensions for which making paintings becomes a means of knowing
and questioning the nature of cross-cultural experience.
Explorations took the form of increasingly immersive journeys in Australia, India and Pakistan
and a series of paintings utilising extended scroll formats with additional outcomes of
documentary films. As the key research spaces for practice-led research, the scroll paintings
employ pencil, collage, watercolour and oil, and a metaphoric fusion of styles and techniques of
painting and drawing, notably Persian miniature and life portraiture as a means of accounting
for and sharing the abiding experiences and encounters yielded through travel.