Tusalava (Just the same), from Lye 2009

Pencil on notebook paper
90 mm x 140 mm

Artist's collection, Sydney

While watching the animation,
Tusalava (Just the same), 1929,
by Len Lye,
I made this sketch.

I recognised similar forms
emerging in animations
that I was making to reflect
my understanding of Antarctica.

Lye's meticulously hand-drawn
dots and lines suggest many things:
celestial motions,
biological and physical systems,
components of a machine.
Tyler Cann notes that
Lye's work displays a preoccupation
with 'conflating the biological and the geological,
the mechanical and the sexual'
(Lye in Cann, 2009, p. 67).

The final image of Tusalava
is a set of concentric circles.
For Aboriginal people,
concentric circles can represent
connections between their stories (Russell, 2010).

Concentric circles also resemble
the limnal 'cup and ring' marks
that define ancient boundaries
between known and unknown territories
(Collingridge, 2008).

The last image in Lye's film
focuses the eye centrally,
as one might focus on a mandala.

Two elemental forms emerge,
transform, and envelop each other.
Like the 'people and things at war with each other'
(Leslie 2002, p.2),
in Cohl's animation, Fantasmagorie,
Lye's forms seem to be
engaged in some kind of ancient combat ritual.

Forms behave like bacteria and antibodies at war.
The sense of division is heightened
by the contrast between black and white forms.
Yet these forms also merge.
They evolve and move through membranes
that once divided them.
They separate and reconnect
as if to perpetuate
cycles of change within a unified world.

Tusalava expresses opposing conditions
co-existing within an environment.
Lye's dancing elements reflect
the Gaia view:
elements interact as parts
that work together to form a whole.

As the earliest human language,
gesture pre-dates the linear,
logical language of words
(Quill, 2008; Corballis, 1999).