Red Earth, the Australian Outback, and
Isolation | for Slow Journal
Iceland | for Paradiso Magazine
Iceland,
Paradiso Magazine, Feb 2019
After stumbling across faint whispers of an abandoned C54 plane wreckage in black-sand encrusted volcanic mountains through vintage film negative archives.. Always a window-seat, only a carry-on, Brunswick Heads-based artist Jess Lacroix delve cameralens-first into the land of the ice and snow, from the midnight sun, where the hot springs flow. Enter the surreality of Scandinavia’s mysterious and tantalizing Íslandia, in the chase of a baron airplane graveyard entangled in the aurora borealis that boasted a story about the curve of forgotten things.
“Velkomin í eitt af undrum veraldar: Welcome to one of the wonders of the world”; My best mate Anitta (earning her stripes as “littl geysír” after this expedition) ft. my restless appetite for spontaneous one-way-ticketed roaming landed me floating on the dark of the moon. Spilt into the Blu Lagoon in Grindavík, Iceland, reveling in geothermal seawater cradled in raw volcanic earth.
10am in Iceland had us en route to Reykjavík city in a volcanic-ash insured rental car, shamelessly burning through our budget on arrival with our first 22,000 króna priced beer bombshell. We sipped and got dazed in our silica-caked ‘kinis swimming through lush lava canyons and melting away jetlag in the rich warmth of kool-aid-blue water, all the while awestruck of each beautiful Icelander we crossed paths with in the lagoon. Into the mystic we went.
Hand-scribbled road trip maps in worn sketchbooks, phones off the grid, and ad-hoc tickets aboard a new underdog airline landed us a seven hour layover in the Montréal, Canada airport. With news of Icelandic air-traffic controllers’ first ever strike stranding our restless bums; we made an adventure of it, before the grand adventure even set off. Just two hours from our home city of Ottawa, we practiced our native français while knocking out all our souvenir-shopping kills on Supreme-font “Poutine” beanies, anticipating our neon fuscia bird in the sky that would deliver us into another world.
When we finally arrived, it was like ripping a hole out of time… Wild horses, erupting geysers greeting our cameras before entering Þingvellir, a sinking rift valley and gorge which had us dancing with one foot on the North American tectonic plate and one foot on the Eurasian plate. We decided Iceland was meant to be experienced in the rain under moody skies and we pinky-swore we’d never breathe a word of our first feed being a Boston Pizza we found hidden in Reykjavik city after realizing we actually do not speak Icelandic. In its only bustling city, yet so vibrantly infused with thriving coffee culture, high fashion, Nordic minimalist design and architecture, we hunted for street art and skate-shops (Unfortunately, we did not suss out The Icelandic Phallological Museum, one of Reykjavik’s most boasted tourist attractions).
The tree-less landscape and the winding road unfolding to Duke Dumont’s Ocean Drive beats narrating the ocean drive of our lives, we quickly realized that waterfalls poured out of the island’s every cliff’s edge, wrinkle and fold, while every shift in the temperamental sky rendered the cinema reel we were racing through in a radically different lens. It was like being on the moon. Dusty lilac-painted snow-caps to the expanse of our homeland Rocky Mountains, with the lush rolling hills of Ireland, while the technicolored geothermal hot springs nestled in the arms of volcanic beasts dared the black sand beaches. Oh, the black sand beaches, and the surf in the glacial lagoons, all ruggedly packaged up in twenty-four hours of Arctic daylight: We were hooked.
We journeyed to the deep south of Iceland, to the most off-road point that doesn’t exist on any map, somewhere between Skógafoss and the back-in-time town of Vík; guided by vague GPS coordinates and tongue-twister names we couldn’t pronounce, we rolled with the music, teasing an “access-restricted” sign cradled by the Sólheimajökull Glacier. This marked the departure point of the palpable dreamscape pilgrimage to what may or may not be the site of the plane wreck that would await us after a monster hike. Not a soul in sight, we abandoned our tuckered out lil car and set forth on foot, bundled up in barely enough winter gear (even for Canadians). Strutting to the musical stylings of A$ap Rocky & the Lumineers, polaroid camera in one hand, and the big ticket camera in the other, I felt the thrill heavy as we trudged on through the freshest of air and anticipated the sight… Until there it was in all its guts n glory. My muse. Haunting remains of a 1973 US navy plane in its eerie desolate beauty, flaunting its take-over by nature at 66 degrees North.
I have always felt that there are certain places in life that seep into your soul, becoming forever marked by it. You need encounter such places only once for your life to be unsuspectingly, perhaps suddenly, altered. This was certainly one of those places, I stood before it for hours... tracing the bruised airplane carcass with my hands, swooning over the beauty of the stillness of the moment that would always be apart of my story, completely enlivened in getting lost and wide awake with passion for the ride.
It is fatal to know too much at the outset; boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is overcertain of his plot… it follows that off-the-beaten trail travel has always kindled my insatiable hunger for life and for living, for the messy bits, “for life IS the messy bits” - as my truest inspiration (my mamabear) always taught me, to the sound of an Eagles LP spinning on the turntable. I travel to feel small, to be devoured, to be calmed by the unknown, to find pieces of “home” interwoven in it all, to flirt with life and to ignite a tumultuous love affair, to forever be marked by a place, by a moment, by a perfect stranger. This photo documentary is my love letter to Iceland.
Wide Open Spaces, The Red Earth, Isolation
Slow Journal, March 2020
“L’homme se situe entre le néant et l’infinit.” A treasured quote I so often peel out of my most dog-eared French novel that hibernates nowadays in the glove box of my - formerly rainbow-painted – sun-bleached Toyota Corolla through the past few laps around the sun in Australia. Amidst other contents of the messy treasure box of a glove compartment - littered with polaroids, unsent postcards, and surfwax – is evidence of past loves, the people and the places, and a lucky-dip of roadmaps from past lives.
This deliciously dizzying saying, lifted from the pages of a novel I studied in French Immersion homeroom in elementary school growing up in Canada’s capital city, always stuck with me. It tells how Man has within him, infinity and nothingness, and is paradoxically situated somewhere in between the two. After a hectic breakup (are they ever not?), after the bushfires, and after the floods, I was invited aboard a rally car roadtrip across the desert to Alice Springs set for the same time this pandemic grounded us all in solitude, or in an inescapable prison of introspection… pick your poison.
I’ve been in this race against myself to write new journeys, through art, through photography, through the road itself... Afraid, so afraid, of Time; Afraid of becoming stagnant for but a moment; scared of a lack of change, scared of double-dipping, scared of a lack of movement... But what’s so shameful about stillness? This sentencing of isolation, a container of wide open space, I first felt stuck in it, claustrophobic and paralyzed by a plethora of potential. I chose to finally write those stories authored by my dozens of worn-and-torn sketchbooks, piles of one-way plane ticket relics, evidence of loves fought for, truths stood for, planks walked, waves ridden, dives ducked. Perhaps the wide-open stillness isn’t an inarticulate blur of negative space after all, but its seemingly empty shell contains infinite newness procurable in the familiar, as we make friends with the shadows on the wall in this limbo of the in-between.
Space cadet that I am, spaced out by the restlessness pulling at my hair like waves peeling, electing the empty spaces as my muse, and fueled by too many fleeting inspirations – that, and a fatal soy flat white addiction – I’m incessantly hungry to run, to feel, to make, to seek, especially when musing in this no-man’s land and in the passions we keep. I’ve always attributed that heightened bolt of pure inspiration needed to produce artistically to solely immaculate newness – therein you’re given the temporal time and place to capture it all through the lens of being immersed entirely in it and nothing else. Ephemeral inspiration makes for the need to furiously jot it all down when it visits, in an attempt to bottle the feeling, to write, draw, paint, folding myself into it like a blanket, to scribble, sketch, like a madwoman, the coordinates of the found inspiration, before it rushes away, to later revisit it for a taste at a later date.
I realized there are so many stories I’ve not yet written about, hints of these maps leading back down the rabbit hole of forgotten magic – on a pilgrimage in Iceland, in getting lost in the snowy Rocky Mountains, in sailing in New Zealand, on an offgrid tiny house block of bushland near where the river meets the sea… – through these fragments of the stories accessible by the pages of faded film negatives with mismatched notes that I’ve stowed away for a rainy day, in telling myself that I must keep searching for that next new adventure. How lucky we are, I decided, to choose to procure renewal in revisiting past – and unrecorded – inspiration, as the company to keep in these empty moments.
True film photography is my passion. As a ruthless grommet, travelling and watching my talented mum cherish her 35 mm Minolta gem and fancy lenses got me hooked. Gazing through the imagination of an old film camera is like stepping outside of time for a moment. With each click of the shutter, an unpredictable narrative is revealed; its blurry-soft and dreamy-toned images are a unique interpretation of reality rather than an accurate representation of it. My first true camera I purchased for myself was a 4x5 Mamiya medium format beast, from a vintage camera sale when I first began Artschool in Canberra doe-eyed at the Australian National Uni.
Not long after, she was about all that accompanied me in a spontaneous trip to flirt with the true Australian Outback for the first time. 2014 marked the year Australia became a Home I couldn’t shake; it was my first uni break, I had lusted after a surf trip to Noosa or Byron, but decided on Alice for my first true Aussie exploration, it only seemed right, to venture first into the true and unedited integrity of this new place I was swooning irrevocably for. And a vintage 1940s Mamiya rb-67 weighing a ton, making me work for it, seemed only fitting to trek across the desert with, as means to author the spectacular journey. In art school days, I indulged for hours in the darkroom, enthralled in the physicality of developing film myself, shooting 8 x 10 sheet film in large-format beasts, cloak over the head, accordion body in hand, tin-types, cyanotypes, home-made pinhole cameras, you name it – each acting to evoke a powerful miniature narrative, with the ambition to capture the humanity and vulnerability of my subjects, whether it be framing an imprint of a place, a portrait, or a moment stamped in time. This was my still point to the turning world, and my chaos to find thrill, all in one place.
It follows that as a film photographer, I thrive on travelling, on getting “lost,” on abandoning the norm and convention, to find something new in the inordinate, and in finding beauty in unfamiliar places... No plans, no maps, no rules. I feel it is the richest gold in this world.. Through true travel like this, we find out what we’re made of – travel takes control away from us, exposing our weakest points. We are acutely aware of our vulnerability. We are naïve, unaccustomed, unacquainted, unversed, roaming in the darkness of the thrilling familiar. Travel pushes us across the chasm. We are moved to explore the mysterious, to confront out fear, to venture beyond the challenging, cryptic crevasses of our path. In my experience, the only people who ever get anyplace interesting are the people who get lost.
On the airplane trip over to Alice, I realized why the Aboriginal paintings are dot dots: This is how the outback looks from a bird’s eye view. After numerous flight cancellations and delays, when I touched down on red soil, I was told the desert was flooding. A tropical cyclone off the unruly coast of Queensland had injected the renowned parched desert with bodies of water for basins that had not seen so much as a few raindrops in years. A photographer’s dream ensued.
My travel sketchbook read:
In the past three days, I have sketched this country by bus, plane, train, and on foot. I have toasted champagne by the biggest monolith in the world after eating 536km across the Northern Territory in a vehicle in one day. Rode racing camels at sunrise, trekked across sand dunes, bushland, hiking to see salt flats, a mesmerizing bed of crystalline color. Found myself dazed, hiking 20k around the entirety of the 350m tall Ayers rock, awestruck as its coloring evolved from burnt yellows, iridescent oranges, to blood red, and vibrant mauves, with the panning through different angles on the track, upstaging an otherworldly sunset.
Here, I learned of the Aboriginal tribal ceremonies in the sacred sites of their practices, observing ancient rock art, munching on bushplums on the hike, smelling fragrant wild mint and eucalyptus growing in the bush. After travelling on 130km/hr speed limit highways without encountering a single other vehicle, driving off-road alongside dozens of running wild horses, running parallel to a flying eagle with a 3 meter wingspan, indulged in unrolling swags to sleep on the dusty red earth under a hyper-real sky littered with millions of stars, which was arguably the best sleep I’ve had in my life.
Awoke at 4am to dozens of shooting stars overhead, bore witness to an overwhelmingly rich scope of the Milky Way, and expanse of sheer majesty that I will never forget. Journeyed up a cliff to catch a theatrical sunrise with gigantic Kata Tjuta at one side, Uluru at the other. Standing high above vast expanse of red planes, I stood, breathless enveloped in 360 degrees of a surreal sunrise; On the road again. Entered the amphitheater of the Olgas, a 10km rocky climb. Hiked up, and through the heart of enormous russet domes, seemingly gravity-defying red waves of rock that cascades within the rough terrain of Kata Tjuta. I found Karingana lookout on the Valley of the Winds - where the scenery engulfs you – which can only be equated to the Lost World of Jurassic Park – monstrous red cliffs open up to reveal a valley that appears to recede infinitely and flawlessly with lush cobalt shrubbery extending to a horizon line animated with lavender mountains. Descended an unstable deep rusty red-stained core of Kata Tjuta in through patches littered with pastel-hued canopies of cliff, stepping atop massive agate rocks and seas of iridescent gemstones. Found natural yellow ocre, painted on a cliff rock. Drank the purest water you’ll ever taste, dunked myself in a basin fed by a miracle stream of water deep within the Olgas.
Watched Anangu artists create dot art, amidst spear-making demonstrations. Stopped in at Curtin Springs, where emus and native birds roamed free. Began Kings’ Canyon rim walk with steep ascent up Heart Attack Hill – the infamously dangerous climb to overlook the gorge of the canyon. Smashed a 4h rim walk through an incredible range of sights within Kings Canyon (the REAL Grand Canyon!). Climbed the beehive-shaped cliffs of the Lost City. Got lost, found more than I could have ever imagined.
Crossed a dangly bridge over a 200ft drop, climbed gumtrees, and descended creaky staircases to get to the Garden of Eden – a secluded room-like lagoon enclosed by the highest of cliffs enveloping lush shrubbery and a crystal-clear waterfall. Stood at the edge of the highest cliffs I’ve ever imagined: Closest feeling to being able to fly. Tripped over sights that halted my every weighing thought; The immensity, the sheer magnitude of beauty and of inspiring wonder. This is the real Outback, the rugged, gritty, soulful Red Centre. This is Australia.
Reflecting on journeys like this one, in Iso day idontknowwhat: Trying to pour into gratitude in this strange time, over sinking into the heavy overwhelm, into the insatiable restlessness and debilitating headnoise. Swapping counting the days for counting myself a lucky chooka to be ‘stuck’ in nature during iso with fresh fruit & veggies, paints, film-cameras, books, music, yoga, things to learn, ideas to churn, froths n kaks, and sun that’s still spillin’ each day in spite of each one blurring into the next. There’s still saltwater, swell on tap, caring mates, slow home cuppas n soydogs, passion, sun-risen kookaburras, dusk-wailin’ cicadas, fragrant bottlebrush, slinxy dolphinos, banksias and bushland. Forced to live slow, and to live simply, confined to only an immediacy of experience, forcibly enlivened to only what is the here and now: I guess can render us into a terrifyingly numbing sleepwalk, or, it can tantalise a new unpolluted appetite for the real things at stake in our lives, with how unimportant so much else, the old common currencies, have become. At least now we know ‘time’ - & materialism - never really mattered anyway hey?
NoBadDays on The Mid North Coast, Film Photography, and Itchy Feet
Focus Magazine, June 2019
You are a relative newcomer to the beautiful Mid-North Coast. Tell us what brought you here, and why you decided to stay?
Such a special part of the world to be enveloped in! The Mid-North Coast has certainly captivated my artistic appetite and sparked my creative innovation. I was based up in the Northern Rivers, as a creative freelancer managing a few of my interdisciplinary passion projects in Brunswick Heads when I was introduced to the innate charm of this tranquil slice of exquisite coastline through visits to Pacific Palms.
I’m originally from Canada, and with my twenty-sixth lap around the sun approaching in a couple of weeks, I’ve been consumed with gratitude for just how many inspired slivers of the world I’ve been lucky to get to call home so far, and this unique treasure of the Mid-North Coast is certainly leaving a potent mark on me. I cite blame partly to its lush rainforest boardwalks as gateways to its salubrious surf breaks punctuating the diverse coastline. I’m consistently dazzled by the humbling seclusion procurable on uncharted bushwalks impelling heights and views for days, enamoured in the richness of nature, giving breath to hidden cove-bordered rock-pools and seemingly secret nooks to uncover. From that mirage of infinitely flawless turquoise lake that bridges the sister towns, to nonchalantly being greeted by a pod of dolphins passing through in a companionless surf, this haven doesn’t cease to sweep me off my feet. An invigorating drive, tracing the veins of the Great Lakes is reminiscent for me of the freshness of my homeland’s stoic Rocky Mountains. Undeniably, the humble unspoiled beauty and stunning textural expanse of panoramic contrast digestible with awe from each angle, edge and indentation of the Great Lakes region enticed my artistic motivations, offering grounding for a fresh creative catalyst.
Let’s start with your photography… tell us how you got into it, and what sort of photography you love to do now?
I have always been a sucker for old-school film photography! As a grom, travelling and watching my talented mum cherish her 35mm Minolta gem and fancy lenses got me hooked I reckon; Gazing at the world through the imagination of an old film camera is like stepping outside of time for a moment. With each click of the shutter, an unpredictable narrative is revealed; its blurry-soft and dreamy-toned images are a unique interpretation of reality rather than a true-to-form reflection of it, similar to the act of preserving aged memories, or the unraveling of nostalgia. Immersed in multiple exposures, light leaks, and color drips, much of my thematic conception for artistic motivation in other mediums draws from film photography inspiration.
In Art-school days, I indulged for hours in the darkroom, enthralled in the physicality of developing film; shooting 8x10 sheet film in large-format beasts, 4x5 medium-format twin lens reflex beauties, polaroids, tin-types, cyanotypes, home-made pinhole cameras, you name it - each acting to evoke a powerful miniature narrative, with the ambition to capture the humanity and vulnerability of my subjects, whether it be framing an imprint of a place, a portrait, or a moment stamped in time. I strive for my photographs to exude evidence of an eagerly attentive rapport between the photographer and the subject – providing an uncommon emotional gravity in a non-contrived manner, straying from the convention of composing snapshots that appear too posed or artificial, incited by an eagerness to see the beauty and the importance in the everyday.
Documentary and photo-journalism is a function of photography that I currently utilize tenaciously through freelancing for a handful of radical ‘zines I’ve crossed paths with. Recently I’ve been pairing my digital photography with my writing - through travel editorials (I recently wrote a piece for Paradiso Magazine (based in Mullumbimby / Byron Bay) about my spontaneous travels to Iceland and the pilgrimage to locate and shoot an abandoned plane wreckage in the Solheimassandur mountains), as well as through the interviewing of other creatives (I photograph musicians, fashion designers, and other legends, makers and shakers for Almost Real Magazine (based in Sydney)).
At the moment I would love to pursue documentary filmmaking through a meaningful environmental initiative; I feel the filmmaking medium is one I have barely grazed the surface with and am consistently hungry to activate something for a cause through my art as a vehicle to incite positive change. I am always on the lookout for publications and organizations to partner with through meaningful creative collaboration.
You also dabble in other artistic projects (mural painting, surfboard scribbling, film photography coverage, skateboard designing, tshirt silkscreening, as well as festival pop-ups. Tell us a bit about these, and what you’ve worked on in the past?
I definitely get itchy feet when it comes to dancing across the kaleidoscope of my creative toolbox. I thrive on combining instruments through artistic motivations informed by my passion for travel, creative expression, moral impact and intention. I believe it’s so important to stay hungry in your craft. I feel I have so much to learn within each facet of art I’m compelled to push the envelope with on a daily basis, and consistently driven to sculpt out innovative ways to plunge into projects that tease the modalities I haven’t yet dipped into.
In a typical week, I could see myself dabbling in album art for musicians, establishing a live-art painting pop up at a festival, fusing the production of an installation art piece, sinking paints into a one-off custom jean jacket commission, and polishing off digital graphic design work for clients (logos, product photography, typography, sign-writing, illustration).
Designing skate decks came into play initially through my graduating body of work from the Australian National University; through the designing and construction of skateboards, one for a city in every state in Australia. I molded each deck from veneers made of wood native to each specific region, and exhibited the series of hand-made (ride-able) boards with a room-size half-pipe skate ramp that I built within the gallery space, inviting guests to test out the artworks.
Each hand-made deck displayed the distinctive flavor and flow of a particular chosen Aussie city, in an ode to its street-art through hand-painted graphics interwoven into an etched cartographic design on the wood grain. The work invited disenfranchisement, and reinfranchisement of a city for oneself through psycho-geography and through embodiment of the object rather than fetishization of the object, while ultimately the purpose of the artistic creation of the decks was to be ridden, shredded, and wrecked, on the streets they represent - as opposed to being framed on a gallery wall. I’ve since had the pleasure of collaborating with a few epic skate brands in deck art design.
Painting has always felt natural to me – from large-scale realism acrylic portraits on canvasses I’ve built in the workshop, to furiously taking a Posca marker to a mate’s surfboard for a psychedelic tattoo-like linework composition. The common thread through my current production process is the lack of planning, premeditation, erasing, or construction lines. I find artistic style undergoes such waves through inevitable change and growth, but currently I find my work most gratifying when rolling full-throttle letting spontaneity guide my ink. I reckon I’ve always seen routine as the enemy of creativity; I always call upon this infamous line from one of my favorite books, “Nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun..”
You have also developed a clothing brand called ‘NoBadDays’ – tell us about that and what the inspiration was for doing this?
I launched NoBadDays initially as a clothing brand in my hometown of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada (my homeland) a couple of years ago - through the building of silkscreen presses, I developed a unique film emulsion image transfer method wherein to burn my designs into the screens - and began screen-printing my art on sustainable lightweight tees in limited runs, which has been a true passion-project fuelled by an ethos dripping now into many formats. I established NoBadDays as a platform for which to gear proceeds from sales of the tees to causes close to my heart. In the past year, I’ve hosted NoBadDays pop up shops all over Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, contributing to the empowerment of some meaningful initiatives through the production of hand-silkscreened, botanically-dyed tees, vinyl stickers, and prints.
All the forms that NoBadDays has taken on already has been wild; the stories that have become apart of the brand for me and by others internationally reaching out sharing their inspirations and how the 'nobaddays' mantra has affected their struggles and has served as a driving force to step out of the mechanical nine-to-five grind and to live each moment fully awake and inspired, enlivened with passion, as it has for me.
“NoBadDays came about in wanting to create a lil something for the makers, the shakers, the breakers, for the pot-stirrers, and plot-thickeners, for the wanderers and the dreamers. Through travel, surf, skate, falling in love, heartbreaks, neonsigns, foreign cities and familiar passions; It’s about the adventure, the thrill, the grit, the real-ness, broken decks, scrapes n bruises, bearing guts and glory. We are rolling stones, beach bums, mountain nomads; We don't follow the beaten trail, we carve our own. We are wanderers, established never.”
Is there any particular work that you’re most proud of? If so, why?
I pride myself most on teaching – being able to share the wealth of knowledge I’ve acquired thus far in my artistic career is something I’m most passionate about while striving towards exhibitions of my work, the clothing brand, and mural commissions on the go. I’ve been running a fine arts teaching program for children and adults (with a branch of my teaching encompassing a therapeutic arts initiative) which I independently developed as a young entrepreneur, at the age of seventeen, and later made into a mobile practice, taking it with me through my travels. I found my footing thriving on offering interdisciplinary art lessons in which students learn of a vast range of mediums and materials, along with the fundamentals of art history and the principals of design. I’m hungry to offer some pop up art classes and workshops in the region while I’m here – I find the most grounding when I have the privilege of mentoring young artists & witnessing that spark click into gear, nothing is more rewarding.
Where to next?
A question I am certainly no stranger to hearing! My instinctual response is “anywhere I have not yet left a mark on, with walls begging to be painted, and off-the-beaten-trail scenery I’ve yet to turn my camera lens to...” At the moment I’m increasingly invigorated by some alluring local creative collaborations I have in the pipeline… “watch this space.”
Hungry for some word-weaving for your brand, magazine or socials?
Open to all kinds of copy projects - big or small, across all subject matter
Thank you!