I don’t think of myself as an artist, just a person who makes art.I don’t really plan things out. They just happen, and I enjoy the flow.”  ~ John Parish

He’s an inventor, metal fabricator, welder and building contractor. A seeker of opals, a quarryman on Flinders and a rider of motorcycles.

John Parish is not, however, an artist – at least in his own estimation.

Perhaps, but an astonishing output of bronzes says otherwise. So do intricate drawings showing a bird’s flight mechanics, pencil sketches of native animals (with additions from the animals themselves), watercolours and ceramics, as well as representations of Aboriginal myth in multiple metals.

Put the question to John, and he nods towards his surroundings. “I don’t think of myself as an artist,” he says, “just a person who makes … something … out of all this.”

This is Golden Valley, on the way to the Great Lakes, a hillside, where he has a studio and workshop. It is peaceful and beautiful, and more, a playground for everything that crawls and hops, burrows, slithers and climbs.

And it is these creatures, the native animals, that drive and inspire him. They are companion, muse and subject.

It’s been a long journey for John Parish, with Lilydale, Tasmania among the first steps. There, as a 14-year-old, he and the neighbour kids went shooting. At 16, he was on a fishing boat out of Stanley, later at Lightning Ridge to fossick for opals, and then to Flinders Island to quarry.

“Drawing came in fits and starts,” he says. “While I began early, I really took it up at Lightning Ridge when the mines were flooded out. But it was the beauty of that wild place, Flinders, where I taught myself to paint local people.

“This was the time when I thought, ‘This is where I want to go, what I want to do.’ I found myself committed to art.”

. . .

Back on Flinders, he’d learned to weld. It wasn’t what he wanted to do, but the local council made his desire to run a quarry impossible. As it turned out, welding was useful. The foundry where he today casts bronze and stainless steel is his own construct. Steel girders, hoisted into place using block and tackle, frame workshops and storage spaces, rigs for metal fabrication as well as a series of furnaces.

Next door houses generators that produce the power necessary for casting metals, as high as 1,000 degrees Celsius for his preferred material, bronze, or 1,260 degrees needed for cast iron work. Stainless steel, melded to the bronze for strength and colour, also demands huge amounts of electricity to turn it liquid.

But it is what is outside the workshop door that calls. “I like to let nature tell me what to do, to bring together the natural landscape and the creatures within it.”

It’s always been this way. A prompt came in the elusive form of the Tasmania tiger. “As a young man, I lived just across the valley from where we are now. There was something regularly taking our geese, and I heard that characteristic bark of the tiger, the yip, yip sound. I figured out the footprints matched.”

Parish went into inventor mode, building a custom camera to capture nocturnal images. “I didn’t get pictures of the tiger, which was disappointing,” he admits, “but I did get interesting photos of Tassie devils, and that took me down an unexpected path – I decided to capture their footprints, their movements, by sprinkling a layer of soot on paper they would walk over.

“The results were, to my eye, not unlike art by a human being. So I did something similar with ants and rats.” The resulting colour images, beautiful and surreal, are animals making art. Parish retains them in metre-square frames.

He’s even worked with maggots, creating a paint-daubed labyrinth through which they move to get away from light. “Yes, yes,” he chuckles at the inevitable question, “but they make beautiful art.”

Among his interactions are currawongs, perhaps the cleverest of Tasmanian birds. He made a series of boxes, each with a more complex lock and each seeded with a date, a favourite fruit. “I watched them for days,” he says, “and I have no doubt they were communicating with each other. I could see the thought process, the determination to unpick the lock and get to the food. They stop sometimes to sing, play and tease each other. My real sense is these creatures, and wild things generally, are much smarter than we know.”

And perhaps this is why he listens to them. “If wild creatures feel comfortable, they want to live with you. Sure they like the food, too, but by creating peace and calm, they know they’re safe and will come. Some actually come closer to hear my music.” The locals appear to favour electronica, like Tangerine Dream, as well as classical music. But not rock.

. . .

If the physical forms of art and sculpture are the consummation of his work, Parish’s internal feedstock is a deep desire to determine how things work. In the same way a sculptor studies the press of the human musculoskeletal system under the flesh, so John understands the physiology of his outdoor friends.

His detailed drawings of birds, for example, offer da Vinci-like sketches of the mechanics involved in a wing’s movement. And if that art is beautiful, the final renderings are remarkable: Parish is able to form a skeletal framework of the bird in an interweaving of wire, a kinetic sculpture with wings that extend, flap or fold back against the body.

Drawing on that seminal time on Flinders, Parish also ventures into Aboriginal culture, especially that of the Moonbird people, among the pre-eminent mutton birders and sealers of the chain. Their mythology emerges in his figures of bronzed birds, giant wings protectively wrapped around a globe.

In the public realm, Parish’s work is very different. Eight pieces that currently dot the village of Westbury, set in grassed areas and limned by trees and old homes, might be considered tourist signs. But that designation falls short of describing what is a remarkable accomplishment. The works are silhouettes of local figures and events with explanatory text, cut into quarter-inch steel. But by excising selected lines and the image’s shadows, too, Parish co-opts whatever is behind the silhouette into forming part of the whole. The result is a rare conjugation of art and technology.

John first sketches the various elements, drawn mostly from his interpretation of old photos. His particular skill is creating on paper a drawing that in metal form will suggest shadow and crease, even facial expressions. He goes through as many as a hundred design failures before he gets to something that works.

The final design, as a computer file, is sent to a CAD (computer aided design) machine which uses a precision laser to cut the text and images into steel plate, multiple metres high and wide. The steel is curved slightly to give it greater strength and powder-coated to make it rust resistant. Most recently, Beaconsfield added four such pieces to mark its transition into a visitor attraction.

. . .

Elsewhere, his private work – especially the castings in bronze – are beginning to bring premium prices. Sydney galleries are calling. His workbench offers a catalogue of those local friends and neighbours cast in metal, among them squat Tasmanian devils and pairs of native hens with their chicks.

An ambitious piece is a semi-skeletonised Thylacinus cynocephalus – John’s elusive tiger – its head turned the sky and mouth drawn back in a snarl as it attempts to rise from extinction. Its ribs form a cage around a Tasmanian devil, its own future, perhaps, a contemplation on extermination.

How he got here is difficult to trace, he admits. “Truth is, I don’t really plan things out. They just happen,” Parish says, “and I enjoy the flow.”

Art school in Launceston was difficult. He dropped out, but was persuaded to come back, and became involved in a series of large installations including a massive set of aluminium gates resembling ropes. Other pieces went to Singapore, another closer to home at Launceston Grammar school, and some even to his own art lecturers.

John became Dr Parish in 2014 (his Philosophy doctorate addresses the survival of the devil and the quoll), but it is an appellation he won’t use. Nor will he adopt the term artist. “I don’t think of myself as an artist, just a person who makes art. I don’t know why I do it, just that I cannot not do it.”

As issues of life and death thread through his work, it’s worth noting that Parish has been less than kind to his own body. He has been electrocuted, choked, and once even ran (accidentally, he insists) into a vertical mineshaft.

A little over a year ago, while working on the foundry roof, he slipped six metres to the ground. A last-second grab at a cable swung his body sideways, sufficient to drop him, remarkably, between an upright set of oxy-acetylene tanks and a jagged steel post.

He escaped death, but not injury. Recovery has been long and slow, and involved fusing sections of his upper spine with titanium rings. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that very personal inclusion of a rare metal in his own body has spurred his latest quest to know more of the art of metal fabrication.

John Parish is now learning how to electroplate titanium.

Mike Kerr is a writer, journalist, cartoonist, radio producer and occasional comedian at www.theworldaccordingtokerr.com.au

This article was first published in Issue 72 of Forty South print magazine.