JOHN REYNOLDS

‘Colin McCahon lost his mind in the palm grove of Sydney’s Botanical Gardens’, according to cinematographer Leon Narbey in conversation with writer Martin Edmond, following their chance encounter with the artist near the corner of K Rd and Ponsonby Rd, sometime in the mid-1980s. In his book Dark Night, Edmond went on to describe McCahon on that day as ‘a man in a hurry who nevertheless had nowhere to go. His eyes in particular were both haunting and haunted’.

In 1984 McCahon tragically went missing in the Botanical Gardens on the eve of the launch of his Sydney Biennale satellite retrospective I Will Need Words. He was found the next day disoriented and with no identification, five kilometers away in Centennial Park.

With this new project, WalkWithMe… John Reynolds speculates on the possible nature of those missing hours. Leaning on the psychogeography of Edmond’s rich text, Reynolds compiles across a variety of mediums, a pedestrian philosophy of walking, a slow tracking of the fleeting imagery of the urban spectacle, a rummaging of hallucinations, visions and deliriums. Part missing person’s archive, part pilgrimage, part art historical vagabondage. Reynolds wanders with accelerations and slowings across Wooloomooloo and Grey Lynn in a plaintive exhortation to WalkWithMe... Alone, together.