Each morning, one of us brings the other coffee from our stovetop pot. We swig, then fish for tights, tops, and shorts; wriggle in; daub sunscreen, kick shoes on, triple-tie laces, say: “Ready? Yep. I’m ready. Yes. Ready? Okay. It’s over there. Are you ready? Cool. Ready?”

Panel of south sky across the room, intercut with mullions: pink, or lead. We close the door, descend the stair, begin the plod.

As we run, either north or south along Elwood Beach, we talk. Since January, in thick heat, we have run and talked solely about this project, which began as a study of the Yalukit Willam Nature Reserve. As the mornings have cooled, it has changed. We pass a new streetlight. There is a crow. Three lorikeets peck a tuft, flitting loops over clear grass between Head Street and Elwood Pier. Drizzle.

While running and talking, we have increasingly found ourselves gesticulating, as if we are marking up and jogging forward a gelatinous, enveloping canvas. Moreover, as the project has developed, questions of form, light, volume, and counterpoint have grown more frequent, prompting particularly emphatic gestures. We described this method to Alan [Pert] about a month ago, calling it “verbal sketching.” Neologism, always somewhat awkward, seemed appropriate.

Rain. We outline downpipe fixtures. A wavelet whitens, errant, sprinkling the Cole Street spit. Swans, black and untagged. Fingertip paraboloid. The wet, dark basalt        worm.

We return home, walk to work. The canal sometimes reeks of algal bloom, flushed with nitrogen after a downpour. Cockatoos swap shifts with bats in the strangler fig by Wave Street. We talk turkey. The Salmon Street bridge could do with better drainage, and fewer cars. No cars: use Todd Road. Speaking of, the pollinators need to cross Kooringa Way, at the Todd Road or Webb Dock Drive junction, to reach Westgate Park. We need to fit prosthetics to some of those poles—the bifurcated lights, curly arms, on that spine between the carriageways.

Mist. A sulphur crest. We pause, lineate air; trace steel cones of sage, pigface, rosemary, lavender, Tetratheca, roo paw; pause; bracket-fix; flap interlocked batwing hands in imagined dark. Breeze. We powder their bellies and snouts. The port’s trucks knife away, trailing scarlet. In silence, at distance: a hopeful calyx. Our foxes fly out of our fingertips.

We are two people, technically, but we are rarely apart, and rarely make anything alone. This project, Limb, is one painting, not a diptych. It fundamentally prefers fusion to distinction, energised by research into the overlooked architectural potential of ancient and contemporary monist philosophies. It is an attempt to concentrate our curiosities, distribute their echoes throughout a complex precinct, and thereby offer the studio, as well as each other, our truest possible effort.

Likewise, the project’s meditations on place are implicated in its production. We have walked, run, slept, woken, drawn, written, read, spoken, and thought it, cumulatively, in the company of mutually observed phenomena and environments as much as each other: waterbodies, birds, bats, plants, streetlamps, paths, drinking fountains, public toilets, classes, pin-ups, tram trips, and dawn winds, warm through cold. It has been a fluid, broad, unified exercise, necessarily collaborative, and not just between us. We would not have unearthed it alone. Each part is a composite whole.