Escape into the mountains. Australian artist ILUKA shares musings from a photoshoot with friend and photographer, Marguerite Lorraine. The shots capture her in her natural habitat, at her parents farm over the Blue Mountains where she spent time growing up. Together the creative duo created ‘Country Romance.’ 

Like an unadulterated love affair or a gripping romance novel that you can’t put down, this place will always have a hold on me. There’s a kind of rapture, a feeling of expansiveness, a quickening of the heartbeat, a slowing down of the mind, a returning to something that I can never quite put my finger on. An electricity, a flow of the current inside of me that makes me want to write and create melodies not for anybody else but for the sheer sake of needing so desperately to express when there is so much beauty surrounding me.

When the world outside me is crumbling, there is peace here. There is a glimpse beyond the ceaseless pacing of the cage. In the stillness. In the solitude.

Whether it was the hours spent sitting out on the verandah with Dad playing guitar, writing songs together and watching him in his workshop building guitars. Or whether it was growing up surrounded by horses with Mum and learning to listen to how they are constantly communicating with us.

It was all a process of learning how to be in tune with that vibration of life. As subtle and delicate as it may be. My Dad talks about it like having an antenna that is constantly able to tune into the higher frequencies around us. We have this pool of creativity constantly at our disposal, if we choose to tap into it. I always loved this idea because it reminds me that we can never ‘lose’ creativity. We can only block it momentarily, and at any stage can choose to open up the stream once more.

Like any devotion of the heart, first must come surrender and a ‘tuning in’. Allowing that current to flow through us uninhibited and not censoring that experience in any way. It’s not our job to choose if what we are creating is any good or bad. It’s our job to create it merely for the need of expression. I guess this is what growing up on this beautiful piece of paradise has taught me and though I so easily forget in the big city lights (of whatever concrete jungle I may be calling my home), I merely open up a page and am reminded, for this is a romance novel I will be forever writing…