It was during the first heavy wave of the global pandemic and amid the intensity of the first bleak months of lockdown that Port Stephens artist Evie Homewood found herself regularly perched on the sands of Box Beach in Tomaree National Park.
There she'd sit for hours, observing and staring down the lines of her horizon and charting it.
It was only a few months earlier that she'd thrown herself intensely back into her art, signing up to a fine arts diploma at Newcastle Art School.
But the lockdown had other ideas. There would be no art room. There would be no human connectivity. There would be none of the close mentorship that is so vital in pushing and moulding creative thinking into new spaces.
But inspiration has its own ways of making you work when the world closes down around you. You work with what is in front of you and the tools available to you.
Instead of noisy boats loaded with international day-trippers in search of dolphins and the cacophonic trail of incoming tourist cars from Sydney, it was quiet and otherworldly in "The Bay".
At Box Beach, a secluded spot both loved and fiercely protected by locals, it was just the waves, the winds and the surfers. And Evie.
It had become her studio. Her observation deck.
"The natural history of that space is also the natural history of the people in it," she says of the pristine slice of Worimi land, protected by national park bushland all around.
"Box Beach has its own unique wave. Not many places on the coast are like that. It's on the edge of surfing tribalism and people are protective of it as a place."
With an influx of sea changers and holiday homeowners moving into the tourist region during the lockdowns, one day some local kids graffitied "Locals Only" in garish font on one of the rocky outcrops enclosing the beach's white sands. It was quickly removed by teams from National Parks and Wildlife, only to be returned later - again and again.
"You are in this space in an isolated lockdown experience and the writing on the wall just 500 metres behind me quite literally represents the structure of society. You realise you're not just on the land or the water. I was on the edge of it," Homewood says.
Those graffitied words surreptitiously found their way into her work at times, though she is quick to say it wasn't about passing any judgement or making any kind of statement.
"All my sketches keep a record, like a mariner's logbook. It's not just about lines and shapes - there is a tracking there. Every drawing I've tracked as a mariner. There is the date, time, the sea swell, the wind and the seconds between waves as a pattern."
Having spent the past 17 years working the oceans, mostly on the dolphin cruise boats that carve up the pristine blue waters of Nelson Bay, but also on super yachts in the Mediterranean, Homewood had been determined to go back to her artistic terra firma.
Her own version of a sea change had initially brought her back to her childhood home town in 2007, after burnout from the deadlines and daily grind of a career as a respected designer, mostly in news publishing in Newcastle, Sydney, Melbourne and London and later at Time magazine.
She sees her work now as a moulding of those two worlds - both of which follow regular cycles and patterns, ebbs and flows.
Homewood has since amassed a body of work that encapsulates her observations at that intersection of the developed world and the fragility and brutalism of the natural environment. It's a mix of sculptural forms and lineal abstracts - all of Box Beach or variations of it. The sense of place is central.
"I'm bearing witness to us on the land," she says. "I draw the land and respond to what's around our community, both socially and mentally. People are trying to have borders and boundaries and sometimes that can push too far."
Sketching and using the materials available to her, including an old Sydney to Hobart race sail as a canvas or a surface to scratch across, Homewood charted her observations using an atypical artist kit - of white builders chalk, coastal cliff rock, leftover carbon from a beach bonfire, an electric sander, a grinder and a drill - representing the push of the development toward that line.
Her latest exhibition "The Line" is now running at the Artisan Collective at Port Stephens' D'Albora Marina - a local space for local artists and makers that emerged out the Port Stephens Smart Arts program; a partnership between Port Stephens Council, Octapod and The Business Centre Newcastle.
She says the work explores connections and the erosion of time, of boundaries that are self-imposed or otherwise. Her concrete landscape sculptures each sit at an angle of 22 degrees - perfect for sailing. Moulded from cedar maritime trim, through continued repetitive casting, she intends for the work to slowly break down through the creative process - much like the natural landscape.
At times, photographing and videoing her interaction with the landscape has even seen her drag a white picket fence down to the beach to see how the surf toyed with it and how it moodily changed with the rising sun.
So, you have to ask what the locals made of that?
"By then the surfers had seen me quite regularly," she laughs. "People who deal with the ocean - surfers, sailors - they are already people feeling the environment, seeing and smelling it at once. They get it."
For Homewood, there is a vital need for artists to be embedded in their communities and for more spaces for collaboration and inspiration.
Growing up in Nelson Bay, she recalls it as a community where everyone knew each other. Things like Airbnb have changed the fabric of the place and taken some of its sense of community, its intimacy.
"My suburb is full of houses but there's nowhere to live," Homewood observes. "I know people who have to commute from the Central Coast to work. People forget these things. They think because a space is beautiful that it's paradise, but it's also a regional space and that means all the problems that come with it - unemployment, no hospital beds, limited services, high rents, seasonal work."
As for artists, it remains a challenge to survive. It's a challenge she hopes to keep pushing the line on. That is, for creatives around Port Stephens to get better access to "community spaces", or places that support the creative process and incubate them - similar to what has been so successfully done in Newcastle.
"Perhaps the red line now represents the disconnect between artist and community," she muses. "This is where I am. The people around me are the art. It's not just me, it's the whole community.
"It's not just about getting a space for art on the walls, but the space to create something more than a watercolour sunset. A space to be messy, where artists can congregate and all the possibilities that come with that."
