Moon Havoc: Rod Moss

The drawings are of the rocky ridgetops and outcrops in and around Mparntwe/Alice Springs, encountered on walks from his front door. The title work takes its name from the poetic fragment inscribed across it: ‘Moon havoc fell upon the soil with sacred sadness.’ Such inscriptions occur in some drawings to amplify their expressive intent. They are not explicatory. Moon Havoc shows a bright quartz outcrop topping a ridge, with quartz shards scattered over the sloping ground. At a sacred site some two hundred kilometres away, shown to him by longtime Arrernte friends, quartz shards are said to be ‘pieces of the moon.’ Thus, the lunar association of this outcrop and the drawing’s aura of reverence.
For almost four decades Moss made narrative paintings in which his friends figured. They feature in his memoirs. The first, The Hard Light of Day, won the Prime Minister’s award for non-fiction in 2011, attracting national attention as an artist and writer. Both it and its successor, One Thousand Cuts, won the NT Chief Minister’s Literary Award. Environmental concerns populate the most recent book, Moon Havoc, published to coincide with this exhibition.
Rock formations, drawn with loving attention to detail, are pushed to the fore, looming and creaturely, alive with urgency. Vegetation is sparse, small trees mostly leafless, jutt up from the rocks like skeletal fingers. Only the buffel grass flourishes. Scientists now recognise that the grass has wrought an ecological change on the landscape exacerbated by the warming climate. With the repeated wildfires it fuels, destroying fire-sensitive species, it threatens to become a monoculture. This environmental catastrophe, reaching into the arid interiors of bordering states, is not yet widely known nationally, but it weighs heavily on the minds of many in the Centre. Viewers bring, or may not bring, this knowledge to the drawings, but they cannot escape their gravity. Inquiry soon leads here: the rocks will endure, but what else? And who will be able, or want, to live in that world? Its dystopia is evoked in the title poem of the most recent drawing, rocks like a gaping mouth against a blank sky: ‘Great silence returns to fill the endless numbered days.
Kieran Finnane