Ode to the Desert

In 1984 Suzanne H Visser lived for four months in a Zen monastery in Japan, where papermaking was the practice of the house and all of it was done in silence. Each morning the nuns cut kozo, the paper mulberry, in the forest; then they steamed, stripped, scraped, boiled, picked and beat the bark, and scooped the pulp into sheets of washi that dried against the trees. After about a hundred and twenty days she left with a thousand A1 sheets, and she has carried them around the world ever since.Ode to the Desert tells what became of that paper. Her father, the painter Henk Visser, taught her to make bistre, the walnut-husk ink of the Old Masters. Years later she built small clay ovens and learned to burn it in four colours: red sepia, sepia, a yellow like weak tea, and a green like a gum leaf in shade. With that ink, on that paper, she drew at life drawing classes wherever she lived, from Ron Curran’s Dynamic Drawing in the Northern Rivers to the groups in Alice Springs and Maryborough.In Alice Springs she set out to make an ode to the Centre, inspired by Japanese folding screens. The drawings that didn’t make the grade went under the sofa for years. In the end she dyed them in buckets of bistre, tore them by hand into the shapes of ranges, riverbeds and sky, and painted emus, galahs, a goanna on a ghost gum and Sturt’s desert peas over them. The result is four screens, each of four panels: The Dry, Fire, Wildflower Season and Night.Written in plain, quiet prose and illustrated with 13 colour images, this short book follows paper and ink from a Japanese mountain to the Australian desert. It accompanies the Ode to the Desert exhibition at the Maryborough Art Society in March 2027.