TIM LUCAS - MARCH 2017

WINDOWSPACE-BEEAC 2017 - 2#

TIM LUCAS

RECLAIMED

‘This windmill was found corroding away in the salt surface of Lake Beeac. This lake often has shallow water over the winter months and then quickly dries out in the summer, creating an ever-changing salt-crusted surface.’ Tim Lucas

 Tim Lucas, Reclaimed, (2015) 

Beeac has a history intertwined with salt – and windmills. Windmill production began in the last decade of the 1800s and continued until the mid 1900s – at the peak of activity there were six windmill-makers in Beeac. The local lake salt trade spanned the century 1868 – 1968 and much of the industry infrastructure remains in situ.

Tim Lucas’s poetic single image Reclaimed, (2015) captures these two activities in ‘one take’. In a kind of visual haiku, Lucas’ photograph stops the ‘windmill clock’ where it has fallen in the salt lake, and where it will continue to slowly change as it corrodes over the years.

Lucas’s photographic practice is based in the Otways, so he is intimate with this world and that is clear from this image. Like Ansel Adams’ trees there is a monochromatic etched delicacy about the Lucas image that merges in this writer’s mindseye with the American’s work. Photography is about choice and Lucas and Adams seem to choose what they see in the natural world with a loving resonance, sensitive to season and surface, light and pattern.

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For more of Lucas’ images go to: http://www.timlucasphotography.com.au

For more information about the salt trade we recommend Norman Houghton’s Scrapers and Boilers, Beeac’s Lake Salt Trade 1868 – 1968, (2016).

Testament to Beeac’s windmill makers is the present Windmill Park in Beeac, which features a functioning example of the work of each of the six local windmill makers.

Context for that is found on the enameled plaques nearby and in the book Beeac Winds of Change by Dawn Missen and Anne Trigg (2010) – reissued 2016.

AS

WINDOWSPACE-BEEAC welcomes TIM LUCAS in March 2017

STAY TUNED FOR DETAILS ABOUT A PHOTO EXCURSION TO THE LAKE WITH TIM!