On Process:

West is a piece that captures a part of the landscape I have lived and worked in for fifteen years. For many years, I would commute to my work in the Lockyer Valley, driving through the countryside and becoming intimately acquainted with all its seasons, colours, sights and sounds. One staple of this region are the coal trains. They traverse back and forth across the valley, sometimes heading to the city holding coal, sometimes empty and returning west for more. The urban street art that adorns the trains has always fascinated me - it seemed so out of place outside of the city - so alien, as if from another world. Almost daily, I’d sit at crossings, watching this art as the train passed by. I would wonder, with the inevitable move towards renewables, how much longer these trains would be in service. When will their tenure finish? When will they no longer be a staple in the landscape?

To create this piece, I took reference video of the coal trains as well as field recordings of their distinct sounds. I created a representation of the landscape with digital collage, cut paper collage, and coloured pencil drawings. To create the train, I drew its body and carriages in graphite which I then coloured digitally in Photoshop using hand-painted textures I created and scanned. In After Effects, I composited in footage of a storm and fruit bats with the landscape and animated the moving elements.