Agony in the Wind Farm

As the dust settled on my exhibition, I longed for the countryside again. Flight of the Battery Hens attracted over a thousand visitors—far more than I’d expected, but a number that left me totally contented after months of non-stop, soul-devoted work. My favourite part was watching them: what made them pause, recoil, or return? My role has always been that of an observer, so observing others engage with my work was a joy. Being observed myself, however, was surreal because it wasn’t just being seen, but being known. Each viewer who spent time with my work, spent time with my soul, yet I could never know them in return.

Needless to say – I grew weary of being perceived. I am deeply grateful for the attention this exhibition has received—it has nourished my practice and given me a sense of love and reassurance that will sustain my next body of work. But just as a bear, having basked in the sun, eventually seeks the solitude of its den, I, too, feel the pull inward to a kind of hibernation. I crave retreat, a quiet burrow far from the gaze of anyone beyond my circle of friends and loved ones.

So, I decided to spend a week in the historic whaling town of Albany, where the Great Southern Ocean rages along the shoreline with an angry, tsunamic force. My plan was to stay with my friend Maddie, who is currently working a media job down there, load my parents RAV4 with paint and brushes and my easel, and work on my portrait of Yoshio Honjo, my 2025 Archibald entry. It felt like the perfect way to ease back into studio work. For the next week I’d paint out of Maddie’s shed, or from the boot of the RAV, pulled up to a viewpoint overlooking the Bight, or near Lake Seppings or wherever I found that would allow me to get into the zone of creation.

On the first evening, Maddie took me to the Albany Wind Farm, situated along a 5km stretch of rolling bushland dubbed the “Sandpatch.” Overlooking the Great Australian Bight, 18 great turbines stand like steel monoliths against an indigo sky. Their blades hum a mechanical drone, turning their bulk around a pointed metal eye that gazes out into the abyss. The power station was the largest of its kind in Australia when it was commissioned in 2001 and it generates over 75% of Albany’s energy. Clean energy aside, it’s an ominous sight; 18 iron giants hypnotised by the raging waves of the Great Southern Ocean. Each blade hauled over the next, caught in an unstoppable spin. I felt entranced by them and then, by the raging wind and wave that keeps their turbines spinning.

I look out to the ocean, then to the turbines, then back again. The wind whirs—a metallic hum behind me, an endless roar ahead—becoming the landscape’s soundtrack. My hand grips the wooden railing of the lookout, and for the first time, I look down.

Beneath me, the ground drops away steeply before softening into sandstone and shrubbery, tumbling toward the sea. Waves gnaw at the coastline, stretching endlessly in both directions. They keep coming, wave after wave, perfectly lined in white rows, each awaiting its turn to swallow the shoreline, drinking up the sand and bleeding into the earth. At my foot, I notice the pathway continue a little way along the lower edge of the cliff. Leaning over, I can see it draw a yellow ochre line through the bush, sloping just slightly down the cliff and curving into a small sandstone cave. Footprints and worn rock tell me it’s been well traversed, but my knees lock and while my heart wants to see the view from inside the cave, my body is more rational.

But I breathe and then find myself edging my way down the track. It’s only a short walk, a mere 10m continuation of pathway, and I arrive in less time than it took to for me to decide to walk it. I collapse my weight against the powdery wall of the cave, which is like a yellow mouth in the landscape that frames a perfect window of ocean and sky, two shades of the same blue. I feel like the bear in its den, terrifyingly aware of abyss ahead, but safely cocooned in the Earth.

The horizon stretches so far from east to west that I can almost sense the curvature of the earth. Somehow, the mid-point of the horizon is just a millimetre higher than at the edges of my field of view. It’s a hard line, the horizon, but it’s also blurred and fuses with the sky. I blink and the clarity of the line returns. And then, if I adjust my eyes just right, I swear I can see a wall of ice.

Have you ever looked out to the ocean, or a forest, or a lake, especially from some great viewpoint, and contemplated how much life exists in that cross-section of planet? I wondered: How many sharks, how many whales, how many urchins and octopi and jellyfish exist right now in the many square kilometres I perceived? How much life is hidden beneath the violent salt water that stretches on and on, until Antarctica?

In my den, I suddenly fear that a snake might emerge from a crevice.

There is a unique terror in witnessing the Earth from such a sublime vantage point. It is a reminder not only of our individual fragility but of our shared existence on a planet that nurtures us and yet could destroy us if we fail to respect her. The most extreme version of this is the overview effect experienced by astronauts, who, upon seeing the entire planet, no longer perceive oceans, deserts, storms, and forests as belonging to individual nations but as part of a fragile, miraculous whole.

Sitting there and looking out to the Great Southern Ocean made me reflect on why I am continually drawn back to nature after periods of intense work, particularly in a public arena. I realise that it might not just be a longing, but a necessity, to periodically return to the sublime. It is not natural for one person to be seen by a thousand strangers—it can make oneself feel fragmented at best, inflated at worst. But to see the Earth from this high up, and to sense that she is seeing you too, is the perfect antidote, for it reminds us that we are neither as significant nor as isolated as we might feel. In the face of the planet’s sheer scale, human recognition feels fleeting, and the self, rather than swelling, humbles and expands into something more connected. It’s here that we may tap into the muse and create new art that is driven by spirit and not by ego.

But still, there is the terror of the turbines. And it is a different kind of terror.

In the cocoon of my little sandstone cave, I could not hear the mechanical drone of the windmills. But in my mind’s eye, their colossal image remained clear. What’s scary is not their height, nor their metallic blades, not even how strange they look when dotted like thumbtacks through the landscape. It’s that the force that pinned me to the sandstone, that slowed me to a stop, is the same force that drives their endless motion. And as the wind picks up, they spin faster, and then faster still, churning round under the weight of their own momentum. And suddenly, I saw my studio. Five paintings stacked on easels. A wooden stool in the centre. The palette on my lap. My hand, moving—marking, blocking in, blending out, pulling up, pushing back—over and over, again and again. One painting drying just enough for me to touch it, to push it just slightly further without ruining the layers beneath, and so I move to the next, then the next, and back to the start, my brush caught in its own fevered orbit. The bin beneath my desk is overflowing. A rotten apple. A half-drunk bottle of wine. Ten dried-down paint palettes. A jar of hardened brushes. Eighteen perfect paintings. Five still in process. And I would sleep, and drive to town, and walk to the studio, and paint, and eat something, and paint, and walk back to my car, and sleep, and wake, and drive, and paint, and paint, and paint—

There was a mechanical certainty with which I spun.

The creative frenzy of producing work for a show is a mad and beautiful thing. The work I created for Flight of the Battery Hens, and the creative state it pulled me into, was the peak of my career so far. I have no regrets about how hard I worked, but the thought of never being able to stop until inevitable burnout is terrifying.

In the age of automation, perhaps what saves us is our ability to self-reflect and to recognise when our ego is fractured or inflated. I am grateful for the ability to fall into the ceaseless rhythm of creation, and I am grateful for the ability to stop and stand still in the wind, to sense its force and energy without it carrying me away. It is a kind of gratitude that makes my heart ache for the iron giants on the hill, for I pity the mechanisation of their existence. That night, I saw them in my imagination—all 18 towers, sad-faced Cyclopes—and I wondered: if they could spin for eternity without burning out, how long would it take before they, too, became aware of their own being? Would they stop, just to sense where they are?