‘…To tranquilize one’s mind is to nourish one’s spirit; To nourish the spirit is to return to Nature.’ (Taoist poem)
When Gippsland artist, Elisabeth Scott, took up residence in the unique Float 3909 Studio, a houseboat created specifically for artists to commune directly with Nature in an estuary habitat, she found herself in a rich ecological space, a profusion of light, water, birds, fish and plants and the intricate dynamics between species and habitat.
The FLOAT studio is situated in a forested area about 15 km east of The Gippsland Lakes. It is rich in limestone, native tree and plant species, including many species of Gums and Banksia that provide habitat and nectar for migratory birds. There is a rhythmic cycle of seasonal and annual fluctuations in which fresh water meets salt-water from the ocean. It affects salinity, water temperature, water quality and tidal flows and impacts on the rich biodiversity in these outer perimeters of the Gippsland Lakes ecosystem.
Photo: Lisa Roberts“Once you do stop and watch and breathe and listen, it (the estuary) rises quietly up around you like an audible and visual hum. The bumping of the fish on the underside of the boat throughout the night, the gentle sway, the small window that begins to open to the daily complex bird theatre that plays out around you.” Artist: Elisabeth Scott
Photo: Frank Flynn
The brainchild of East Gippsland’s Float arts collective, led by Andrea Lane and artists Gary Yellen and Josephine Jakobi, this floating studio enables artists-in-residence to literally saturate themselves in the complex world of the estuary.
“FLOAT is a stopping and a surrender. It is without distraction and excuse. It's a creative reckoning, or so it was for me.” Elisabeth Scott
Scott brought to her residency a rich bag of artistic skills, tools and a deep sensibility to the fluidity of a place teeming with life and in constant flux. She has a master’s in visual arts (Monash Gippsland) and a gift for drawing. There is a mature confidence underpinning the technical experimentation and layering. Her previous diverse cultural and ecological residencies in remote Gulkistan, Iceland, and Susami, Japan, prepared her well for the intense immersion and "creative reckoning" in her own regional backyard of East Gippsland.
There are Taoist influences in her technique stemming from the Japan experience and a clarity of vision that may well come from her exposure to the ice and bright lights of the northern arctic. Here in the Gippsland Lakes estuary, an epic underwater narrative emerges that unfolds along a delicate paper scroll, reminiscent of ancient Chinese scrolls.
When the ancient Taoist scholars portrayed mountains, streams, birds and plants they achieved a precision by directly observing and working from Nature. The characteristic aesthetic of the scroll included calligraphy and a complex of multiple perspectives, not necessarily related to a single focal point (the vanishing point) but a 'continuous shifting perspective'. The viewer becomes a traveler in these paintings, which offers the experience of moving through space and time.
Scott appears fully in tune with this aesthetic and, like the ancient calligraphers, adds text that denotes place (3909 postcode) and fine details that betray the human impact on this environment. The translucent quality of paper allows for a dramatic lighting of the underwater space. She creates a crowded composition mirroring the complexity of Nature itself.
She invites us to unroll a section at a time to read it – pausing, enlarging, going forward and backward when needed. Scott skillfully unfolds a temporal sequence which, along with layered perspectives, gives her work a remarkable vitality and lyrical style of representation.Ultimately, her layers and light effects fuse the murky underwater atmosphere with the rich biodiversity of the surrounding habitat capturing the rhythmic cycle of seasonal and annual fluctuations.
At the outset she sourced a 10-metre roll of Awagami Kitakata mulberry 36gsm paper from Japan for her intense period of observation on the Float studio. Her intention was to use the scroll to map her immersive responses with experimental layers of soaking, drawing and printing techniques.
The first layer is the monoprint technique - inking up plants from the area with white oil-based etching ink and stamping them onto the natural tones. The effect is the density of the inked plant against the translucency of the light mulberry paper, creating the first subtle layer. The next layer is the frottage technique (pencil rubbing into the paper) applied using surrounding plants and textures.
Scott was keen to apply a traditional Japanese method of fish printing (gyotaku ( gyo“fish”+ "taku“ rubbing”) that originated in the mid-19th century as a way for fishermen to record the size and characteristics of their daily catches. Anglers would keep a supply of rice paper, ink and brushes on their boats so that they could make ink etchings of their freshly caught fish. The prints were so accurate that they were often used to determine the winners of fishing contests in Japan.
According to Scott,"the frottage (rubbing) and monoprint have a loose, accidental nature that works especially well with the combined toughness and lightness of fine Kitakata paper”. Then the detailed naturalistic drawings of birds, plants, insects, flotsam, jetsam and fish are applied using a 0.05 grey ‘Uni pin fine-liner’ as her tool which creates a tension with the looser 'monoprint' technique, 'frottage' and 'gyotaku' effects.
At the final stage the artist engages in a to and fro of techniques... more drawing, more 'frottage', filling in and building up, to express the deep emotional experience once she had fully surrendered to the natural habitat. It's a cacophony of sounds, continuous flux, dark and light, and a teeming abundance of life.
As a creative practitioner, she, like scientists, is playing a significant role in monitoring, nurturing and interpreting the beauty and fragility of the planet. She exemplifies the meaning of 'biophilia: a genetically determined affinity of human beings with the natural world', and she also connects us through Nature to principles of ancient Taoist philosophy.
Text: Jo Moulton Feb (2025)
Images: Elisabeth Scott, Frank Flynn, Lisa Roberts
Post-Script: Regional Artists: Becoming a Threatened Species
Elisabeth Scott grew up in East Gippsland and developed her skills and knowledge through Gippsland TAFE and Monash Gippsland. She is a shining example of a professional artist fully engaged in her artistic career and a graduate of an art education system that once existed in this Gippsland region. With the demise of TAFE art departments, artists such as Scott, like many of the species that she encounters in the estuary, are becoming a threatened species. This diminishes the culture and unique identity of the region.
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