Lynda Draper: Roadside Monuments

On the eve of her father’s ninetieth birthday, Lynda Draper reflects on her memories of being on the road in the 1960s and 70s. Ahead of her forthcoming solo exhibition, Draper looks at how these early childhood experiences, snapshots of memory and dreamlike images have influenced her art practice over the years.

By Chloe Borich

Night driving evokes a surreal kind of magic when you’re little. Bundled into the back seat, you become an actively observant passenger on an otherwise passive journey, traversing highways and petrol station pit stops at the desired pace of your parents. Sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Sometimes as if time has ceased to continue at all. Everything outside your window is cloaked in almost darkness, save for the flickering of headlights and moonlight embracing the silhouette of roadside bushland. Constellations of stars come into view the further you move away from the city, embossed into the sky. Tricks are played on your eyes in the shadows, swarms of houses rise in and out of view, eye spy with my little eye the horizon— beckoning your destination.

Postcards from the artist’s collection

Some of Lynda Draper’s fondest childhood memories are of road tripping across Australia with her father, “My father was a schoolteacher, every school holiday he planned a road trip. Dad, Mum, my two sisters and I would load up the Holden station wagon and attached trailer, then Dad would drive all night to a chosen spot.” They would visit all kinds of places, from hidden coastal beaches to the Snowy Mountains, and vast deserts to tropical rainforests. It was only upon waking that would reveal where they were and the activities that were to consume their days.

During their travels, Draper searched for Thunder Eggs in riverbeds with crystal lined insides; found above ground ant mounds; discovered mysterious caves and waxy stalactites. By the sea, she explored coral reefs; spotted crocodiles up North; and ventured to tropical mountaintops. When they were on country, they visited Indigenous communities. When they passed through small towns, they would seek out homebuilt abodes and outsider architectural feats, as well as offbeat themes parks like the Big Pineapple and private museums, including the house of bottles in Broken Hill, Paronella Park in Northern Queensland. The more obscure, the more interesting Draper found them to be.

Postcard from the artist’s collection

“One of my earliest memories is visiting Santa Land in Currumbin, Queensland. It was magical,” says Draper, “As an adult looking back, it was a crazy homemade outsider fantasy children’s theme park, consisting of grungy miniature monuments and constructions influenced by scenes from nursery rhymes and Disney films like the Wizard of Oz and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” The features of these fragmented characters and unexpected instances of pareidolia—a face appearing in the front of a building or the pattern of a pavement—have found their way into her ceramic sculptural works over the years, evoking realms that blur the lines between the real and imagined.

“As my father comes to the end of his life it’s easy to fall into a nostalgia for what seemed a less complicated past,” reflects Draper, “Australia has changed, I acknowledge sometimes for the better.” Never to be forgotten though are these formative memories of hers, stamped with the postcodes of peculiar places in foundational moments in time. Forever rendered in the clay of Draper’s works they will remain, towering into the air and branching languidly across walls, like a map of her own making.