Deutscher and Hackett

When Tim Storrier first strung a piece of rope between two poles and set it alight, he had no idea that he was opening a creative seam that would sustain his work for decades: a seam rich in concepts and images relating to the distance between two points and the rope as a defining and tensioning device between these points.'¹

With its spellbinding beauty, intensity, and disorienting juxtaposition of real and surreal, Storrier's Point to Point - Evening Line Over the Water epitomises the highly subjective evocations of the natural world that have earned the artist praise. Fascinated by the concept of the seemingly endless horizon, during the mid-eighties Storrier began experimenting with three dimensional constructions of wire, rope and steel which he would install in remote locations and subsequently ignite. Once suspended, the taut cable would mimic the horizon line, now ablaze.

Interested in the power of light, action and stillness, Storrier merges the real and imagined to construct a highly individual landscape imbued with the 'myth of the outback'; as he muses, 'The idea of those horizons is something I still find challenging and rather wonderful. But again it is my view; it is not the reality of the farmer or the people that live there. It is a mythical quotient that had probably gone. As with Delacroix's Death of Sardanapolis, the painting is a myth.'²

1. Murray Cree, L., Dust and Ashes, Sherman Galleries, Sydney, 2003
2. Storrier, cited in Hart, D., 'The Australian Context: Real and Imagined', in Tim Storrier: Burning of the Gifts, Australian Galleries, Sydney, 1989, p. 18