a diary, a history, a walk up the hill
A multiplicity of narrative structures and devices is utilised in Richard Grayson's collection of video works 'A Diary', 'A History' and 'A Walk Up The Hill'. Using a medium traditionally associated with narrative and including literal narratives in the form of descriptive voiceovers, Grayson has explored the potential of the genre in the creation of suggestion, alternatives, and possibility. His interest in such potential is not only explicitly stated in his catalogue essay, but is evident also in his theme of the recent Sydney Biennale of which he was Director. Interestingly, despite such provision for the subjective, the exhibition remains curiously unpoetic, its complexity provided by the concepts it eo-opts rather than their (in parts) malnourished manifestation.
Each video work is the result of separate projects, though their concerns are interrelated. The motion-sick-making 'A Walk Up The Hill' was filmed on a hand-held camera during a trek through the bush, while an increasingly puffed Grayson read descriptions of fantastic places such as Utopia, Shangri-La and Narnia. The relationship between visual and verbal here is not one of illustration: what we see is obviously not what we hear described. Rather, the literal overlaying of these made-up topologies, voiced over the sunny Australian bush, is an attempt to demonstrate how experience is always attained through a filter of some kind; how throughout history certain narratives, or ways of knowing and understanding the world, have replaced those previously in existence. Though not explicit, Grayson presumably refers to how colonial ways of understanding the world and seeing the landscape influenced the conception of the newly discovered Australia and led to the erasure of indigenous understandings- narratives- already in existence. The juxtaposition of the two