A history in detail.
Even as a child, Cameron was endlessly fascinated by the small things. He would follow a slug’s progress across a dusty yard for hours. The patterns in a grain of wood, a bug, a discarded car part, a dead mouse – they all held an equal sense of wonder for Cameron. He has never lost that sense of wonder for the small things; the details that pass most of us by unnoticed are at the forefront of his vision. The gift he has for focusing in on the forgotten aspects of the world around us is given to us through his printmaking.
Cameron was raised in country Victoria where he was surrounded by an expanse of space. A landscape that when seen from a distance looks almost empty, save a few gnarled and noble gums or a herd of cattle. But the land is not empty; it holds evidence of history, of life. Cameron looks at an enormous space up close, inch-by-inch, and notices each detail that makes the whole. He strives to master the art of looking intently and clearly at something. The art of listening to silence.
Cameron’s work is the vision of someone who reads between the lines. Someone who bothers to climb underneath what the rest of us walk over and pick up the things that have fallen through the cracks. Someone who stays silent and still long enough to hear what is never said out aloud.
There is a distinctive essence in Cameron’s work that is at once obvious and difficult to explain. The sculptor Alberto Giacometti once said, “One could not express in words what one feels with ones eyes and ones hands”. There is a real sense of feeling in his prints. Looking at each piece one knows that its’ simplicity is deceiving. It can be compared to reading a story when you know the characters have lives beyond what you read on the page. Each piece has a history – details that are not there for us to see but we are allowed to feel if we let the silence and space communicate.
When Cameron first started making prints and sketches he was drawn to found objects, old things, discarded, broken things. Things that might have once been regarded as useful or beautiful but are no longer regarded at all. There is a sort of poetry in the dusty, rusted objects, forgotten relics of time past. Their bare simplicity attracted Cameron because they left so much room to explore composition and technique.
