Nicholas Hubicki
Amongst the She-Oaks

In evening light and wind, you see the Manna gums flickering with intense light and speed, imagining their fuel combusting, imagining each shifting mass spreading its flame in enfilade.

Later you had seen a man in a silver gum. You watched him perched on the silver gum’s branch, perhaps in turn being watched by him. All silhouette against a paler sky like a negative. You thought of Tommy McRae’s drawings: figures in trees, hunting, a thicket of camouflage. It was night by then. The anxiety you feel in this place at night. Yet you are also haunted when the sun makes chimeras from the swell of a ferny-leafed acacias or she-oaks. The site’s ghosts formed by daylight.

Drawing from an album of 15 ink sketches by Tommy McRae/Yakaduna, Stalking Emu, ca. 1885.
Source Credit: Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Hubicki’s current work focuses on both the constructed and natural world, drawing upon sources such as architecture, urbanism, entropy, botany and geology. His work is conceived less as individual documents than as a discourse between things: their state, genealogy and memory. Hubicki lives and works in Melbourne, Australia.