On Top of the Wake [/caption]
On Top of the Wake
Uncertain of what I caught
I stare into a coded representation of a reflection
A sentient experience
I'm on top of the wake
Ralph Kerle (c)
On Top of the Wake
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="1386"] On Top of the Wake [/caption]
On Top of the Wake [/caption]
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Kandinsee - Kandinsky, Matisse and Dalí in Reflected Water
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The Inner Life of Water - Serendipity, Curiosity, Ikigai
Water moves, Light welcomes colour and dances, A presence asks to be seen. Ralph Kerle 2026 [/caption] It began, as it often does for me, on the water. I was kayaking on Sydney Harbour in extraordinary conditions—one of those April days where everything felt as if it had resolved itself into something complete. The air was clear, the water moving just enough to remain alive, and my body had settled into that familiar rhythm of stroke and glide. It was as if I had finally discovered it was nature that had created paradise. There is a point, out there, when something shifts. The mind stops organising the world and begins receiving it. It is not quite thinking, and not quite observation. It feels closer to meditation—though even that doesn’t fully describe it. A kind of openness arrives, and with it, something I can only call a heightened attentiveness. Not dramatic. Not mystical. But a clear sense that something is present—and asking to be noticed. It was in that state—still moving, still on the water—that the question first appeared. Not as a conclusion, but as a quiet insistence. What is it that happens in these moments? Why does something unexpected suddenly feel meaningful? And what is the force that makes me stay with it? A red hull drifted into view, its reflection slipping and reforming beneath it. For a moment, I found myself less interested in the object than in what it was becoming in the water—stable above, unstable below. Present, and yet constantly dissolving. And it was there, in that subtle shift of attention, that three ideas began to take shape. Serendipity. Curiosity. Ikigai. They did not arrive as definitions, but as recognitions—something I had been living without ever naming. And as I remained with them, still drifting, still watching, I felt the need to hold onto the thought before it disappeared back into the vault of the unconscious. 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To look closely is to risk seeing something unstable—something that shifts as we stay with it. The longer the gaze, the less certain the image becomes. This is true of the reflections I work with. They resist resolution. They refuse to settle into a single meaning. And it is precisely this instability that holds me there. Curiosity is not satisfied by answers; it is sustained by the possibility of seeing differently. In this way, the role of water begins to change. It is no longer simply a surface that reflects, but something that participates. Something that moves, distorts, reveals, and conceals all at once. What I am engaging with is not just an image. It is a relationship. [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="3470"] The Redness in Reflection [/caption] Ikigai: The State That Remains Over time, something begins to form. Not a single moment, but continuity between moments. Not a question, but a way of seeing that quietly repeats itself. 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And somewhere in that movement, I recognise something familiar. Not that I am observing the water—but that I am thinking with it. In this sense, Ikigai is not something separate from the world. It is a relationship to it. [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="2974"] Water Percussion [/caption] A Reflection on Intelligence What has surprised me most in writing this is not the ideas themselves, but the way they have taken shape. This essay has emerged through a dialogue. On one side, there is lived experience—embodied, sensory, immediate. The physical effort of paddling. The shifting surface of the water. The moment of recognition that arrives without warning. On the other, there is a form of intelligence that does not experience any of these things. It does not see, or feel, or inhabit the world. And yet, it is capable of reflecting those experiences back in language—organising them, extending them, giving them structure. In a way, this process mirrors the very phenomenon I have been describing. I encounter something in the world. It is reflected back to me in another form. And in that reflection, I begin to understand it more clearly. The relationship between perception and articulation becomes a kind of loop—one that deepens rather than resolves. If there is a single insight that has emerged from this reflection, it is this: Meaning is not something we impose on the world. It is something we enter into relationship with. Serendipity offers the moment. Curiosity asks us to remain. And over time, those moments begin to shape a life. A life that feels less like something we have planned— and more like something we have discovered. And sometimes, in the quiet balance of the water, something else is present— something that doesn’t belong to thought or perception at all. As Japanese haiku master, Matsuo Bashō understood, this meaning does not sit apart from the world—it appears in the act of noticing it. 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Water Map 1 — A Map Made by Water
Water Map 1 110 × 180cm “I think about the country where I was walking and camping, all the main water holes, all the camping areas… and I follow them up with my painting.”— Freddie Timms, East Kimberley artist When I first looked at Water Map 1, I did not immediately see water. I saw sand. I saw an aerial field. I saw something that appeared to have been remembered rather than photographed. This new work belongs to both my Offshore Aerial Collection and my Sand Talk Collection, and perhaps that is why it captured my creative focus in such a compelling way. It began, as usual, as a photograph of reflections on the surface of water. Yet the final image seemed to have travelled somewhere else. It no longer behaved only as water. It appeared as terrain, as if a moving surface had opened into a map. What struck me first was the space in the work. The simplicity of the central form. The way the surrounding field holds it quietly, without crowding it. The centre of the image feels spare, but not empty. It has weight. It has presence. It sits inside the work like a place. Almost immediately, I thought of the great East Kimberley painters: Paddy Bedford, Freddie Timms, Rover Thomas, Queenie McKenzie, Shirley Purdie, and the Warmun/Turkey Creek artists whose work transformed Australian painting. Their paintings can appear deceptively simple at first glance: large areas of ochre, strong forms, restrained composition, vast spaces. Yet within that apparent simplicity is country, memory, movement, ceremony, history and story. I do not pretend to fully understand the emergence of Kimberley painting, but I have long been moved by the way it carries a view of land that seems both grounded and aerial. Freddie Timms’ paintings are often discussed as aerial maps of the Country he knew through walking, camping, mustering and living. His statement about remembering waterholes, camping areas and places of work speaks directly to the way painting can become a form of following — not inventing a place, but returning through memory to where one has been. Shirley Purdie offers another statement that stopped me because of its connection to photography. She has said: “When you paint you can remember that Country, just like to take a photo, but there’s the Ngarranggarni (Dreaming) and everything.” That phrase — just like to take a photo — is extraordinary. It makes a bridge between image, memory and Country, while also making clear that the image is not merely visual record. It holds story, spirit, inherited knowledge and lived experience. Examples of Kimberley art from Freddie Timms, Shirley Purdie and Rover Thomas (l-r) When I looked at Water Map 1, I felt an unexpected connection to those statements. Not as a claim to Indigenous knowledge, and not as an attempt to make Indigenous art. Rather, I felt a recognition in the idea that an image can become more than the thing it first appears to depict. My photograph began as water. Yet it appeared as sand. It was taken through close observation, yet it felt as though it had been seen from above. It was a reflection, yet it opened into something like terrain. In that moment, the artwork seemed to sit between surface and depth, between looking down and looking over, between water below me and an aerial perception above me. In the late 1990s, I was fortunate to spend time working on a cultural project connected to Indigenous ritual and creative practice. Being on Country and being exposed to the visual languages of Central Desert painting began to shift my understanding of what painting could be. I started to understand, however modestly, that these works were not simply images of land. They were ways of holding land, knowing land, remembering land and seeing the world. What astonishes me still is that both Central Desert and East Kimberley painting often seem to contain an aerial perception long before the aerial image became part of ordinary visual culture. They appear to rise above the land while remaining profoundly inside it. That is the feeling that returned to me through Water Map 1. There is also, for me, a strange sense of ascent and descent in the work. I am looking down into water, yet the image seems to lift me upward into an aerial field. I am photographing a surface, yet the result feels as if it has emerged from beneath the surface. Water becomes sand. Reflection becomes map. Abstraction becomes a place of recognition. This is why Water Map 1 feels like a new threshold in the Sand Talk Collection, while also belonging naturally to the Offshore Aerial Collection. It is an offshore image that behaves like inland memory. It is water that seems to remember land. I am interested to know whether others sense this too. Do you see water, sand, aerial Country, or something in between? Does the work carry, for you, an echo of Kimberley painting — not in imitation, but in spaciousness, restraint and the feeling of a map seen from above? For me, Water Map 1 is not a map of water. It is a map made by water — and perhaps, more truthfully, a map made by looking long enough for water to become memory.
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