Perth-born Jacobus Capone is willing to clamber over glaciers in the Arctic Circle or bury himself for weeks in a Japanese forest to make art. Only, he wouldn’t call it art.
In 2007, at the age of 21, Jacobus Capone took a scoop of water from the Indian Ocean, walked across Australia, and emptied it in the Pacific. The journey took 5½ months and killed off any relationship he ever had with his native country.
“That was my last university project,” he recalls. “I was very naïve and ignorant. I had no idea what to expect. I went into it physically untrained, wanting the landscape to put an imprint on me – and it did! After the first day, I could barely walk, having covered 40 or 50 kilometres, and that set the tone for the whole journey. For two or three years afterwards, I didn’t want to have anything to do with the arts. It instilled a deep sense of trauma.
