Viewfinder: Tom Waite’s Outline

By Justine Varga

“For the hand ventures forth, it precipitates, rushes ahead, certainly, but this time in place of the head, as if to precede, prepare and protect it. A safeguard, a guardrail. Anticipation guards against precipitation, it makes advances, puts the moves on space in order to be the first to take, in order to be forward in the movement of taking hold, making contact, or apprehending.” Jacques Derrida – Memoirs of the Blind

I began writing this piece for Tom Waite’s first exhibition of drawings before I had seen anything of the works themselves. I did this because I wanted to say something about who my friend is, and I perceived that who he is would align with the works I would get to know. I only ever knew second hand that Tom was working away quietly making artworks. His partner Sally would mention this to me from time to time. This, and, when I would visit their home, I could see in the small sunroom that an easel had been set up and that the board resting upon it bore the many traces of its use. The drawings, but for these tell tail signs of their existence, were otherwise out of view. He, himself, kept this pursuit otherwise private. It wasn’t a secret, but there was a quietness in the way Tom went about his work. I could sense the care in his approach to the task he had set for himself. He recognised that the creative process can be fragile and needs protecting. Over the time that I have known Tom, I have observed that this is the same sensitive attention he pays to all aspects of his life. It is this way of being that is here manifested in his drawings.

Ink, charcoal and paper. These are the primary materials that comprise Outline. The subject is the coastal fringe near Waite’s home in the Sydney suburb of Coogee, in particular the area that lies a little further south, between Malabar and La Perouse. A few markers and place names are enlisted as titles to assist us as we meander through their terrain: Kamay; Cabbage Tree Palm, Kamay; Bare Island, La Perouse; Cape Banks; Coast Hospital; Coast Hospital Cemetery; Flag; Shore. Yet, most of the drawings remain untitled, or more accurately, they are Untitled. It is this absence of naming that leads us most of the way, for/e it is the drawings in and of themselves that direct and locate us, spatially and temporally. On this fibrous substrate, we see an outline that delineates without providing the whole. We see there how it softly describes while allowing the image to form within the viewer’s mind. Suggesting forms with tone by way of the hand. A blot on the horizon, a mark in the eye, a touch to a page. With penetrating gaze, that touch prompts, coaxes, guides – gently.

When I viewed the collection of drawings in the flesh for the first time, although all together constrained to a few small irregular sheets of paper, I was struck by the variety in scale he employed and the distances evoked between Tom and his subject. Sometimes he is looking off into the far distance and at other times he in in the thick of the scrub or seems to have been swallowed by the sea. Yet all of this journeying happens at no more than arm’s length away and mostly closer still. By holding the page and pressing to it the brush, pencil, or a stick of carbon, a coastline is perhaps somehow apprehended. As Tom has said himself, “The works are simple but are my own way of understanding these places in Sydney.”

At his edge we see him testing, working it out for himself back then for our benefit now. Finding the right tone to capture a field of vision. Shifting perspective, turning the sheet this way and that. Flipping it over on its back, and then its head. The hand supports the operation. Stained fingertips leave their trace at the margin, along with the residue of faint soot loosened from the body of the drawing. Instability is an undeniable quality and the surface bares the trace of their stilled not-quite-stasis. Making sense of place through a creative act. On a landscape where colonialism is writ large across it, but where its Indigeneity is enshrined deep within. Where it is, was and will be forever present. How do we reconcile a past that never leaves us? Because we know the past never can. How do we take stock in a world we have pushed to the brink? Not unknowingly, but unthinkingly causing so much damage. Tom is drawing while a pandemic is raging. It is a thoughtful and thought-making response to make. To caress each undulation with our sensory tip, to search with an open mind, is an act of reciprocity. To hold vigil and witness at all times of day, throughout each season; to commit to memory, with its different shades of lightness and darkness, over years, respectfully; to acknowledge and say its name: Kamay. Slow down, feel it out, anticipate precipitation. Don’t be afraid: the observant hand we behold within these drawings is already there ahead of you.