It was during the first heavy wave of the global pandemic and amid the intensity of the first bleak months of lockdown that Port Stephens artist Evie Homewood found herself regularly perched on the sands of Box Beach in Tomaree National Park. Login or signup to continue reading There she'd sit for hours, observing and staring down the lines of her horizon and charting it. It was only a few months earlier that she'd thrown herself intensely back into her art, signing up to a fine arts diploma at Newcastle Art School.
But the lockdown had other ideas. There would be no art room. There would be no human connectivity.
There would be none of the close mentorship that is so vital in pushing and moulding creative thinking into new spaces. But inspiration has its own ways of making you work when the world closes down around you. You work with what is in front of you and the tools available to you.
Instead of noisy boats loaded with international day-trippers in search of dolphins and the cacophonic trail of incoming tourist cars from Sydney, it was quiet and otherworldly in "The Bay". At Box Beach, a secluded spot both loved and fiercely protected by locals, it was just the waves, the winds and the surfers. And Evie.
It had become her studio. Her observation deck. "The natural history of that space is also the natural history of the people in it," she says of the pristine slice of Worimi land, protected by national park bushland all around.
"Box Beach has its own unique wave. Not man.