When I turned 50 in July 2001, my colleagues at Quiksilver Europe gave my wife and I the gift of a four-day long weekend at the legendary Hotel Marmounia in old town Marrakech, Morocco.
Pressures of work meant that we couldn’t take the break until late September, just a couple of weeks after the events of 9/11, and I remember the eeriness of being woken before dawn by the wailing from the mosque below us. But we took our coffees onto the terrace and watched the artisans and sellers wheeling their wares into the labyrinthine souk (or market) that was to absorb most of our stay in this strange and beautiful city that soon became a place of the heart.
Over the next couple of years and half a dozen trips, I came to know Marrakech and Casablanca very well, but those memories had begun to fade until I walked into the Bendigo Community Bank in Tewantin this week and marveled at the colour and chaos of Pam Taylor’s lively and timely exhibition, Travel Memories. The exhibition space, pop-up shop and artist-in-residence program is part of Bendigo Bank’s profit for purpose agenda, with Tewantin and Cooroy branches leading the way in creating new opportunities for awareness and sales.
As the bank’s Zoe Reinke explained: “Over the past 18 months we’ve developed a strategy to give back to the local art and creative community through a free exhibition space for artists within Noosa Shire for four weeks and the opportunity to be our artist in residence. All sales revenues go directly to the artist.”
Veteran Noosa artist and teacher Pam Taylor says the space is a welcome addition to a diminishing number of display opportunities for locals. “Exhibiting your work has become much harder in Noosa in recent years, often very expensive in terms of what you pay for the space and the commissions they take. You can get into the odd café or restaurant but you don’t sell much. So, for me, this represented a great opportunity to show my specialised work on travel. I thought, we’ve been locked down or kept at home for so long, let’s bring people out and let them travel again, if only vicariously through a trip to the bank.
“Even when we were hanging the exhibition, people were coming in and trying to identify the pictures, remembering their own travels. And in Noosa a lot of people, like us, may never travel internationally again. Now I paint my travel memories, and just bringing out the works I’ve done over the years brings all the excitement of those journeys back.”
Pam and husband Alan travelled extensively around the world for more than 30 years from the early 1980s, but they particularly loved Europe, Morocco and Turkey. (Pam lists Paris and Istanbul as her favourite cities.) Al was the happy snapper initially, but Pam, a lifelong artist, soon grabbed the camera and created a vast visual diary of street scenes, people, buildings and the built environment.
She says: “I was a still-life artist at first but then I got into landscapes and found I had to use the built landscape as well, windows and doors. I’m a colour person and that’s what I look for first, but then I’m interested in the form, and looking at the old photos taken at ground level, it’s not always apparent, but now there are drones that zoom in on details from all angles and you can access the images on the Internet, which is a huge help.”
Does she regret the likelihood that she and Al will not travel again?
“No, I think you reach a certain stage where you don’t want to wait in queues at airports and go through all that stress and strain, and now after Covid it’s probably going to be even worse. I just feel privileged to have done so much travel. When I started planning this exhibition with Zoe some months ago, I didn’t realise that travelling again would be so imminent by November, although I think international travel is still a way off. But whether you’re planning a trip, or just reminiscing about trips past, I think my exhibition will evoke some wonderful memories.”
Travel Memories features 24 canvases depicting France, Italy and Greece, but the major focus is on the brilliant colours of Morocco, and that’s what got this old Maroc jock thinking about one last run from Casa down to Agadir, as soon as the coast is clear. I’m sure it will create similar fantasies for many frustrated travellers.
The exhibition is open during banking hours until 17 December, with Pam at work in the front studio on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
