Yesterday’s colour was green. Not only was it St Patrick’s Day – apparently celebrated with great joie de vivre in Sydney – but I spent a delightful afternoon exploring the Royal Botanic Gardens with local artist, Wendy Shortland. Wendy kindly showed me around this beautiful green space and we had a grand old time admiring the plants and wildlife.

There was much to see and I took plenty of reference photos of natural forms. Yet the thing that struck me most was the strangeness of the living bamboo covered with graffiti. I don’t always like graffiti; often it can seem intrusive and destructive and I’m particularly ambivalent about graffiti on trees and rocks. Up in the Blue Mountains, seeing graffiti on trees in the rainforest threw me into a rage at the stupidity of people. However, in this case, it had resulted in powerful totemic sculptures that reminded me of the Aboriginal funeral poles I’d seen a couple of days earlier in the Museum of Contemporary Art. The harsh scratched writing had been softened, stretched and transformed by the living plants to form a beautiful monument to the basic human urge towards mark-making. I am still ambivalent about this need to mark other living things as our territory, yet it was impossible to deny the compelling accidental beauty of the end result.

Kirsty Hall: Graffiti on bamboo, Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney

Kirsty Hall: Graffiti on bamboo, Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney

Kirsty Hall: Graffiti on bamboo, Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney

I’ve always been captivated by this sort of communal art form where aesthetics are not always the driving force. In the early 90’s, I spent a lot of time looking at African sacred objects that had been worn smooth by thousands of respectful hands or covered with nails to the point of bristling. I also studied Western traditions of sacred objects – medieval relics, votary offerings, rosary beads, museum displays and the like. I longed to make something with that same sort of presence but realised that it wasn’t possible for me to simply copy an existing form or process and ‘fake’ a sacred object. Years later, it’s something I’m still struggling with and much of my work using repetitive processes hinges on that concept of how to imbue an object with power and meaning.

Back in the gardens, I was also very enamoured with the enormous fruit bats that hung from the trees like giant cocoons.

Kirsty Hall: Fruit Bats, Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney

En masse, they are incredibly noisy – a plane overhead will set of a cacophony of squawking. Indeed, Australian wildlife as a whole seems quite loud to me, many of the birds can raise a real racket – the evening roosting of the parrots has to be heard to be believed. Perhaps they need to state their presence so loudly to combat the daunting distances of this vast land.

Today, I too am feeling daunted – only two and a half days left and still so much to see. Part of me wants to rush over to Sydney again and spend another afternoon looking around, while a greater part of me is arguing for a day spent on the beach in Manly! There has been so much rushing around lately and I feel overfull of textures, shapes, sounds and experiences; I know it will take me months to digest what I’ve seen here.