For two and a half years artist Michal Glikson became a nomad, travelling first around Canberra, and then Pakistan and India, documenting her travels on scrolls she carried everywhere with her.
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Her detailed miniature paintings capture places and people from the nooks and crannies of cities as diverse as Canberra and Lahore, to the rugged terrain of Pakistan's North West Frontier, to the tents of families who took her into their homes.
As a PhD candidate at the Australian National University School of Art, Glikson's journey has been documented in the Australindopak Archive, a body of work which not only includes the actual scrolls but an online interactive virtual tour that features 40 documentary field films and 70 field generated sound compositions.
She wanted to tell the stories of the displaced, the marginalised, the homeless, in all these places she visited. She would sit and paint in situ, in Garema Place, on the streets in Delhi, documenting what she saw and heard, in miniature, in sound bites, with film.
The seed for the project came through conversations she had with indigenous artists who told her tales of storytellers and the place they held in communities.
"They spoke to me about storytellers and how they were revered," Ms Glikson said.
"About how if you feel the need to travel beyond, there may be reasons, there may be stories to be told. Your work is to listen to them, your work is to bring them back, and circulate them."
Ms Glikson battled illness, bureaucracy and the idea she was a woman travelling alone throughout the two and a half years she was away. She drew inspiration from the likes of artist William Simpson who was an 18th century painter who travelled the Indian subcontinent as an official artist for the Raj, and Freya Stark, the British travel writer who defied the mores of the time during the early 1900s and often set out alone.
"Travelling on your own can be arduous, it can be a mental and physical challenge," Ms Glikson said.
"But at the same time you're laying yourself open to the forces and the stories, you become very approachable and I have an idea that's what might have happened. I didn't set out looking for subjects, they walked into my life."
Each night Ms Glikson would perch on her bed in a small room, find a corner in a tent, and paint, draw, jot down notes about what she had seen, working directly on the scroll itself.
There are three scrolls, measuring close to 24m in length in total.
"I never had much room to roll it right out while I was travelling," Ms Glikson said.
"I've only got a sense of the panoramas that have eventuated from these journeys through times like this where I can roll the scroll out fully and have a look and realise what a cross cultural panorama has evolved."
Her scrolls and the interactive virtual tour are on display at the ANU School of Art and Design main gallery until March 11.
