Eastwards, the mainland of Sweden shatters into a thousand islands, strewn into the Baltic Sea. For centuries the maze of confusing passages protected Stockholm from invaders. Today the sea lanes are threaded with ferries linking together isolated rocky islets and their hideaway cabins. After three hours of weaving our way through this magic Archipelago, while the sunset draws out its colours over the long northern dusk, I arrive at my destination. The boat nudges its bow against a tiny jetty and I leap ashore to find my cabin not far away, hidden behind dark grey rock slabs worn smooth by rasping ice. It is tastefully done up in a contemporary interior decorating style. Clean white pine is offset against darkened, scuffed objects trawled from junk shops or neglected barns: an empty chest on the floor with rusted hinges, a honeycomb on the wall; outside an old horse-plough by the deck and a handsaw on the traditional red cladding.

There is a gesture towards respecting old objects and their histories which I appreciate . . . and yet . . . something grates. Especially out here, where the timeless stone slabs, with their patches of green and orange moss, lean in towards the windows. Not so long ago, life would have been hard, like most places in the world. The few objects people had would have been precious and valued, necessary tools to sustain a tenuous existence in a harsh environment: the plough, the saw and the honeycomb. These once vital objects, with all their stories of pain and joy, are now reduced to stage props.

No-one wants to go back to living like this (though, who knows, we may be forced to one day!), but for all its struggle and pain, I feel there might have been an element of reality that we lack now. No, reality is not a good word — what I mean is existing closer to the rawness of the earth, to the immutable forces of nature that give life to everything, including us. We are lucky enough to have distanced our lives from such an existence, but I sense that this separation has two faces, where the gains come at the price of other losses. It enables us to look, from the comfort of our lifestyle, on antique objects with a pleasant nostalgia. Their users endured pain and hardship that our affluence now holds at bay.

Yet the distanced objectivity which allows appreciation also sunders: does it mean that we now lack some deeper connection? Does our insulation also keep us at arms’ length from reality, and worse does it engender a little smugness? Once essential objects are now adornments for lives more empty in some respects — like the tempting aroma of fresh bread, they hint at something out of reach. Once fishermen struggled through storms here to feed their families — now their nets are more likely used to create ‘atmosphere’ in the cocooned cocktail bars of the obscene monster cruise ships that loom over the islands as they slip out to sea.

Every time I come to Europe I get the sense that it is a population and a culture that has lived out its time and is now easing into retirement; it consumes theme park entertainment and feeds off the past. In Denmark I stayed in an old fishing village whose harbour is filled with plastic “pleasure craft”. Small thatched fishermen’s cottages are expensive real estate, prized for their history and authenticity. Visitors wander the streets buying ice creams, gazing at old artefacts in museums and yes consuming art. I am an artist, I believe in the power and importance of art, yet it is also another way of living life vicariously through the passion of others — through manufactured experience.

By making life safe, bearable and comfortable, we have kept harsh reality at arm’s length, but in doing so we have also made life tame. We are like animals, once wild and free, now caged and docile in our cities. Efficient clothing and buildings mean we never really feel hopeless, body-shaking cold, nor the flooding relief of becoming warm again — likewise all the other experiences of being human. Some people resort to extreme sports to explore the edges of feeling and awareness of living — some sadly descend into expressing passionate hatred of others. But more and more they are living second hand lives and I don’t think that is good for the human race.

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Flying home over Australia I gaze down, like Zeus from his mountain-top, on the barren and raw land below. I long to get out and feel the soil between my toes and to scramble over the rocks, and yet I know that of course I could never survive in this land. I may love it and yearn to merge my spirit into the earth, but it cares nothing for me. Life just goes on, driven by its own imperative. But this rock, this lone tree struggling against the elements, this is reality — not the clamorous cities that scream “look at me, look at me”. All man’s sad attempts at aggrandisement are chimeras and flimsy facades that will eventually crumble back into the land. I watch the red speckled surface of Australia slip by below me, splashed here and there by black spider fingers of ranges and scarps, cut through by snaking gorges. All these patterns are part of the eternal matrix of life, governed by the infinitely complex structures and growths of nature. And driving straight through all of this runs the single-minded indifference of homo sapiens: the thin white line of a road.

Just like everything we do.