The international observer - photographer of nature

John Lyall's bird subjects are all daily visitors to his mother's backyard in Australia. Picture / Carolyn Robertson

Tourism has had a strange effect on the way places and experiences are portrayed. Even the more remote corners of the globe have found unusual ways to package their culture, especially when contrasted against the reality of a location.

Artist John Lyall has co-authored several books and numerous papers on the subject with his partner, Claudia Bell.

The couple's 1995 book Putting Our Town on the Map looks at the way New Zealanders use roadside installations of giant carrots and big cows to promote themselves.

Last year, Lyall contributed a chapter about stamps to the book Cultural Studies in Aotearoa New Zealand.

"We've got New Zealand hyper-ecology represented by stamps," he says. "There's a notion that roadside big things and hobbits and kiwi all roam.

"And so [there is] this ubiquitous peopling of the hyper-nature by real things - representations of things, paintings of things, cartoons of things, stuffed things, things that exist and things that never existed."

Lyall and Bell's research has led them to such places as Mongolia and Vietnam.

"Vietnam was looking at tourism and war history," says Lyall. "We were very interested that Vietnam was giving the experience of the Vietnam War. Like, you can go and shoot machine guns and hand-grenades and things - I don't want to be anywhere near where tourists are throwing hand-grenades.

"You can go to the war sites but the people who are going to see the Vietnam War are going to see a war which they have mainly consumed through motion pictures, which weren't shot in Vietnam.

"So they are trying to find the Philippines and Indonesia, or, in Full Metal Jacket's case, Pine Tree Studios or whatever. They are trying to ground [find] Hollywood in the bio-physical reality of Vietnam."

For the exhibition, Borrowed Scenery, Lyall exhibits photographs from his April residency in South Korea at the 9 Dragon Heads environmental art symposium, which included work from New Zealanders Ali Bramwell and Paul Cullen.

Lyall, who grew up in Sydney, took a selection of stuffed-toy Australian birds and pieces of his Mt Eden picket fence.

Expecting to photograph the famous postcard scenery of Munui, Korea, over his own backyard fence - effectively borrowing the view for the duration of taking the picture - he found Munui's picturesque views of cascading cherry blossoms a setting harder to deconstruct than he expected.

"The tree is the classic cherry blossom tree and, no matter what you do, you can't actually overturn the iconic. You can go head-to-head with it, you can go toe-to-toe with it, but you don't win - you might come off equal," he says.

"I expected to install the picket fence and perform the birds in a performance work.

"And when I triggered the birdsong, just wandering down the road with the blossom falling and getting a kookaburra laugh in Korea and parrot-squeak; when I did the ones that were whistling, the local Korean birds came and squeaked back because they recognised it was a strange bird invading the territory."

Lyall took seven different stuffed birds, all bought in a Brisbane souvenir store, all of which were daily visitors to his mother's backyard.

"As a child I used to belong to the Gould League of Bird Lovers and kept bird-watching diaries and all the guide books, and so on.

"The domestic [reference] is strangely there for me, even if it's not visible, because the picket fence is, if you like, my front yard now and that was my backyard then.

"So, Australian birds evoking 1950s backyard at peak blossom-fall in Munui, Korea, fabricated in China, made for an American company and owned by a New Zealand artist is [its] global nature."

Although Lyall, an obsessive collector of exotic-skinned cowboy boots, has used fake fur and other strange depictions of nature in his work for many years, his interest in toy animals arose from visiting Mongolia last year.

"If I make a fake fur tent, yes it is an interesting statement, but it doesn't bring with it the enormous authority of the baggage of global capitalism, whereas these toys speak of the business of nature," he says.

"One of the poignant moments for me was being in Ulan Bator and being able to buy a snow leopard in a stationery store.

"In the museum were three snow leopards; stuffed specimens in a diorama of mountains," he says of the odd scene that features in the Artspace exhibition, Uncanny (the unnaturely strange).

"Behind the glass in this absolutely artificial stagy setting is one of the rarest and most over-romanticised big cats on the planet - dead as a doornail and fairly moth-eaten.

"And the reality is that the snow leopards are virtually extinct. But now you can buy a toy snow leopard."

Perhaps betraying his Ocker origins, underlying much of Lyall's work is a self-confessed blunt humour, which delights in the ironies of how we represent the world around us.

"Coming from Australia, where your coat of arms is an emu and a kangaroo, I can now go to Foodtown and buy emu and kangaroo; I can eat my coat of arms.

"Compare that with coming from England - nobody can go to the supermarket and buy lion or unicorn," he says with a laugh.

Exhibition

* What: Borrowed Scenery, by John Lyall
* Where and when: 40 George St, Mt Eden, tomorrow to Saturday