Ian Marr

About the work

A pair of undulating slabs are placed on supports just below the water surface of Lake Burley Griffin. The lyrics are from what is at its core a seventeenth-century Scottish folk song, ‘O Waly Waly’, but which, like any significant river, or Lake Burley Griffin itself, is made up of many streams, ‘The water is wide’, the Ulster ballad ‘Carrickfergus’, various love lilts, and ‘Sweet Peggy Gordon’, joining and coalescing at different points in its journey. The Jurassic sandstone slabs are composed of silica grains carried in vast torrential flows from giant mountain ranges in the New England region to become the sandstone measures of the Central Coast. Flow is all; all is intertwined.

About the artist

Ian spent his childhood at a station on the Darling River outside Wilcannia and still works there as well as in his ANCA studio, combining farm work and work in ink, watercolour, oils and stone inscription. He studied Australian local history at the University of Sydney and undertook master classes in drawing and letter-cutting in Australia and the UK. His reading has fed and inspired much of his inscriptional work, including public works such as the Dhurga Rock, an acknowledgement of Indigenous dispossession, Ryrie Park, Braidwood; the Literary Map of the Molonglo; and the standing stone and map stone in the Woden Flood Memorial at Curtin, designed by Neil Hobbs. Ian is represented in public and private collections in eastern Australia, New Zealand, Europe, the UK, and Ireland, and has exhibited in over eighty solo and group exhibitions over the last forty-five years.

Represented by

Stella Downer Fine Art