Erasure, Snow - November

In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg famously bought and subsequently erased a drawing by Willem de Kooning, pointing in many ways to the reflexive psychological reconstruction of or longing for an expected thing through applied absence. Well above the valley, past the tunnelling melt, the snow can linger. Standing near the peak in early November, only the dark rock of the cordillera and the occasional foot trail disrupts the white coverage. Even amongst the semi-cleared slurry tapering closer to the lift station, there are unadulterated and fresh islands. When photographing snowy landscapes in sunny conditions, you overexpose slightly or risk an automatic mid-grey render. But to our eyes, the range was hard and bright, and the sun vaulted the surface to redden our faces when the sun went down.

Almost inevitably I wondered about the landscape beneath. The coverage was still deeper than my looking suggested - we tested well up our jean-legs. But in the heights of Kosciuszko National Park, the whiteness still stuttered the landscape with the beauty of visual witholding. And by the end of summer I know, with the landscape of the Snowy Mountains in maximum view, there is a longing for the hiemal season again. This is what I considered, pushing balled, crystalline snow into the fibres of my wrinkled cotton cloth, dramatically off-white compared to the coverage of the most recent fall. A soaked but otherwise visually blank material square, memory, and the natural visuality of subtraction and manifestation.