Two Creative Lives in One Lifetime
And, It ain’t over yet!For many years I described my life as having two distinct creative careers.
The first was dance.
The second was photography.
Dance occupied the years from 1970 to 2018. Photography began in 1999 and continues today.
It seemed a simple explanation. Two creative lives. Two different mediums. Two different communities. Two different professional journeys.
Recently, however, while developing ART1, I began to realise the story was not quite so simple.
ART1 was originally conceived as a platform for my photographic work. A place to present and sell limited-edition fine art photography. Like many creative projects, it began with a practical purpose.
Yet as the platform developed, something unexpected happened.
What was the relationship between the images I was making today and the creative life that had come before them?
To answer those questions, I began building sections that extended beyond the artwork itself.
The Archive.
Selected Credits.
Press and Media.
Letters and Appreciation.
The Journal.
One story led to another. One document led to another. One photograph uncovered another memory. One archive box revealed another piece of evidence.
What began as a website slowly evolved into something much larger.
It became a living archive.
As the material accumulated, I found myself revisiting periods of my life that I had not examined in depth for many years.
The professional ballroom dance partnership with Sonia Kruger.
International performances in Hong Kong during Australia’s Bicentenary celebrations.
Dance Avenue and the social ballroom movement of the 1990s.
The Cha Cha Charity Ball.
Theatre and movement direction.
Teaching.
Community arts.
Public art.
Photography exhibitions.
Collection acquisitions.
Gallery work.
The stories were different,
yet they shared a common thread.
The dancer learned about rhythm, timing, gesture, movement and audience engagement.
The theatre practitioner learned about narrative, atmosphere, staging and visual composition.
The educator learned about communication and interpretation.
The gallery professional learned about presentation, curation and context.
The photographer carried all of those lessons forward.
Looking back, I can now see that the photographs were never created in isolation from the experiences that preceded them.
The dance informed the photography.
The photography helped me understand the dance.
Each creative life enriched the other.
What appeared to be separate careers were, in reality, interconnected expressions of the same lifelong creative enquiry.
One of the most surprising discoveries came while preparing an archive story documenting the Dirty Dancing phenomenon of 1988.
What began as a simple effort to record a chapter of my dance history quickly expanded into something more substantial. Letters, programs, photographs, newspaper clippings, magazine articles, production schedules and commercial VHS materials emerged from storage and found their place within the ART1 Archive.
The story itself was interesting.
The realisation it produced was even more significant.
I began to understand that these experiences were not isolated events from a previous life.
They were part of the foundation upon which the present creative practice had been built.
Inside each of these overarching experiences were many elements that ultimately contributed to the realisation of ART1 as it emerged.
The platform did not simply showcase photographs.
It revealed connections.
Connections between disciplines.
Connections between decades.
Connections between experiences that once appeared unrelated.
For a long time I thought I had lived two creative lives.
Now I suspect I have spent a lifetime pursuing a single creative enquiry through different forms and mediums.
The labels changed.
The medium changed.
The questions remained remarkably similar.
ART1 did not create that understanding.
It revealed it.
Perhaps I have not lived two creative lives after all.
Perhaps I have simply spent a lifetime putting the pieces together.
Piece by piece.
Story by story.
Image by image.
Experience by experience.
And it ain’t over yet.
Art ConneXions Network 