CREATURES OF THE WOOD

visual Editing by Chris Page

It began with colour.

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Mike Rossi noticed glints of yellow, blue and red within a stack of chopped Tasmanian Blue Gum logs. Curious about what he was seeing,

he began looking more closely at the bark and investigating the natural processes behind its unexpected palette.

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Over the following months, Mike photographed selected pieces in close-up. But as the photographs emerged, something else began to happen.

The colours, knots, cracks and grain no longer appeared simply as characteristics of timber. Faces appeared. Animals emerged.

Strange figures and characters seemed to be caught within the wood, sometimes obvious,

sometimes requiring a little more imagination before they revealed themselves.

Mike even began to see suggestions of comets and stars.

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As he described it:

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“The raw files revealed a zoology of wildlife as well as an astrology of comets and stars.”

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The photographs were not about changing what was there, but about recognising it. By isolating areas of timber and removing

the wider surroundings, details that might otherwise have remained unnoticed became the subject of the photograph.

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As with AUTUMN LEAVES, the photographs became the starting point for an ongoing collaboration between Mike and Chris,

with Chris establishing the visual editing that brought them together as a collection.

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Titles became an important part of that process, reflecting the characters and creatures they began to see within each image.

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What began with the observation of colour gradually became something rather different.

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A small world of imagined inhabitants, already there in the wood, waiting to be noticed.