The journey of "One Hundred Days Around Australia" documents my re-examination of these compelling sites. I recorded my travels with a collage for each day and the resulting work forms a visual diary of my journey.
In these journey observations I explore the way in which the structures in nature and in art, can embody and transmit information concerning the character and spirit of the land. Each day one is aware of the spiritual and poetic forces that govern the patterns and rhythms of nature, making us vigilant and conscious of the care that must be taken in maintaining the character of the environment.

From Lake Mungo to the Kimberley, Davies has explored the unique qualities of these landscapes in three major series of works. Each has conveyed the uniqueness of the local environment: the great 30 kilometre sand dune at Lake Mungo standing out against the endless blue sky, the strong red colours of the Simpson Desert, vast pale expanses of Lake Eyre salt and the white sand and turquoise sea of Cape Leveque. These landscapes share qualities of beauty and fragility but Davies has also recorded the debris of travellers and settlers in her Lake Mungo and Simpson Desert works.

Davies experienced the Cape Leveque area as a place of great beauty and tranquillity, as a spiritual encounter with the environment. However, while the Dreamtime manifests itself specifically in the landscape, her response relates to a Western tradition of understanding the natural world and its evolution through a scientific approach.

What impressed Davies was the timeless quality of the land with its endless rhythms of life, the living, changing essence of the country over millennia. Her assemblages articulate this essential character of the land, a sense of what she calls 'the ordered universe', through the judicious use of the found objects she collected in her travels.

If journeys are voyages of discovery, then Davies' travels have certainly opened new horizons for her by precipitating an acute awareness of Aboriginal Australia and the disastrous impact of white colonization. From the prehistoric remains of Aborigines at Lake Mungo, to their first contacts with European explorers, settlers and missionaries, to a contemporary cultural renaissance, Davies' art bears witness to a land where the Aboriginal presence dates back possibly as far as 100,000 years. Yet the history of contact with the Europeans has been grossly misrepresented. Only now is it being rewritten and re-presented by artists like Davies. She has used fragments of 'language' and tribal names in her work to evoke the disrupted and destroyed worlds of the Paarintji, Wongkanguru and other peoples. However, positive developments are also celebrated in her latest works of the Kimberley area with Aboriginal moves to reclaim traditional skills and lifestyles.

Apart from the early settlers, Aborigines were subjected to the ministrations of French and German religious orders intent on Christianising and civilizing them. Davies acknowledges their presence through the use of the multilingual texts collaged in particular works. In a similar way, she previously used music in the Mungo works to evoke Christian hymns.

Processes of change which the country has undergone are intimately connected to the lives of its inhabitants and none more so than the transformations wrought by the Europeans. The settlements, the environmental damage, the debris and the vandalism which they brought in their wake are all compassed in Davies' understanding of the land. So too is an approach to the environment which draws on the tradition of scientific journeys that began in Australia with Captain Cook's first voyage. Davies earlier focused on Madigan and his scientific expedition to the Simpson Desert, and in this series, in the 1924 Culwulla expedition from Perth which explored the area between Broome and Wyndham. Her own work reflects a scientific interest in the collecting of data which can be seen particularly in her boxes. Into these museum-like environments Davies assembles her specimens gathered from the area under study. These boxes are also reminiscent of reliquaries, of important links with the past.

In science, art and history we fabricate stories that elucidate the past and help as understand the present. Through such narratives we acquire knowledge  the world and at the same time create it. All narratives are journeys of sort and journeys have a tale to tell. Davies' work gently reminds non-Aboriginal viewers that they cannot comprehend the land until they see the human history that is part of the landscape. While Aborigines are clear about their relationship to the country, non-Aboriginal Australians, as she has shown, need to journey forth, to lore unknown worlds in their quest greater understanding. Traversing beyond the boundaries of white history enabled Davies to produce an art rich with knowledge of the land and its peoples. Her discoveries, her 'souvenirs', open up new vistas in Australian landscape art.
 

Day 86 Isabel Davies collage on paper 18.5 x 18.5cm

"Nyal Nyal Specimen Box" mixed media 12x43x35 cm

Day 78 Isabel Davies collage on paper 18.5 x 18.5cm