‘I’d been driving down Sydney’s Victoria Road for 50 years. I decided to walk it.’

In March 2006 Sydney artist David Watson donned his Dunlop Volleys and, stepping expectantly over the deep sandstone gutter outside his home in Rozelle, hit the bitumen. Lightly equipped – a curious eye, a pen, an old 35mm Olympus camera and a couple of apples – over two years (and 19 walks) his steps traced a slowly observant, meandering route west along the Parramatta River corridor. Walking With Cars, an exhibition of his photomedia work at Eastwood’s newly refurbished Brush Farm House gallery in November, explores his ‘findings’. Concerned by what is being lost, erased, overwritten – Watson deploys low-tech means (eg his home scanner) to photographically resuscitate and re-mind.

A lyrical late-19th century Australian travel diary – Landlopers, by the largely forgotten poet/walker John Le Gay Brereton (bohemian, literary confrère and first professor of English at the University of Sydney) – provided the catalyst for Watson’s walk. Brereton’s delightful tale charts a journey on foot from his family home (on what is today Victoria Road) in Gladesville to Jenolan Caves in 1899.

Watson’s project forms part of his PhD at Sydney College of the Arts. In part it is an ode to the seemingly unremarkable suburbia through which he ‘has beetled without so much as a second glance’ for much of his life. More broadly it is a snapshot of ‘how we’re travelling’ at a time of spiraling oil prices and over-consumption. Walking With Cars is a curious and eclectic project – an artistic response to home, to place, to one’s ‘country’ at a time of intense global flows and virtual communication - which both revels in and recoils from the local. Watson’s ‘research material’ is gleaned as often by a chance meeting, an overheard conversation or a discarded object as by conventional means. The photo-works in his exhibition are similarly, delightfully, tinged with loss, serendipity… hope and beauty. In 2009 Watson will complete a return journey to his home in Rozelle by canoe.

Walking With Cars will run from 22 to 30 November 2008, at Brush Farm House, 19 Lawson Street, Eastwood.

Image: David Watson, Lost - 'Coachman' [Eastern Whipbird], 2008. 260mm x 500mm. Lambda print face mounted behind perspex, laser router cut, 260mm x 500mm.