The Shackled Breath (or The drift of last winter's ash)

In keeping with my 'vessels' series, this work is a tiny foray into the world of assemblage art. Constructed from objects found around my home and studio - a discarded vase from my bathroom, ash from my winter stove, a clear plastic lid from the kitchen recycling and a picture of the moon cut from an old encyclopedia and sourced from my drawers of collage materials and ephemera.

Just a thought one Winter's morning while contemplating all that we hold, all that is poetic and inexpressible within ourselves and within the world. How the sacred is bound so intrinsically with that which we often overlook, discard, dismiss, destroy even. Held in our hand, can we tell what ash once was? A forest, a being (a parent or child), a home, a fire to keep us warm, a love to kindle joy in our soul. Someone told me once, often actually, that I feel things too deeply. and I then wrestled with this observation. That is intrinsic to my nature, just as this ash is more than dust.

I often think about objects in the context of artefacts; how the very nature of our investigation changes their nature and, yet, they may remain unaltered by our observation. If I place this ash in a vase, on a shelf, it could remain this way for a thousand years and what would it tell us? Would it convey my actions as I lit a fire, my dreams and hopes as I kindled its flames, my feelings of despair as I struggled with the green wood or the cost of its purchase. Would it tell the story of the hands that lit it.... and beyond that, what of the wood that had fallen, the trees that gave their life, the forest consumed.

The moon is an artefact of the Earth, a space rock, circling us in her elliptical orbit. We observe her but she does not observe us. The lid acts as a barrier between the ash and the paper, two artefacts formed from trees. Eventually, it will all disintegrate, even the plastic, the metal frame, the glass of the vase... and become dust.

The title is taken from one of my Empty Kingdom poems: Elegy of a Dead Bird.

Smoke of the Earth

Tales from my Witches Garden....



I was out in the garden just now, looking at my pots of herbs, contemplating my plan to move them into the garden bed when the earth warms and I noticed this creeper which I have seen around the property.

After some research, I discovered it is called "Fumitory".

It is is a an Old World plant with spikes of small tubular pink or white flowers and finely divided greyish leaves, often considered a weed - a herbaceous annual flowering plant in the poppy family Papaveraceae.

According to Wikipedia, due to its "smoky" or "fumy" origin of its name comes from the translucent color of its flowers, giving them the appearance of smoke or of hanging in smoke, and the slightly gray-blue haze color of its foliage, also resembling smoke coming from the ground, especially after morning dew the plant was commonly called fūmus terrae (smoke of the earth) in the early 13th century, and two thousand years ago it was already noted for its potent medicinal properties.

How appropriate to find it weaving itself around my Witch's Garden.


The Secret Self

New work:

Just experimenting with these new works really, "painting out my feelings" - catharsis, divination, visionary art. I spent about three days on this piece while my son's been a bit sick and hauled up on the couch sketching too. We watched a few great docos over the past few days - The Magic Art of Jan Švankmajer is a great one, a couple about the making of and symbolism behind Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth and we are part way through a discussion Robbie found with Alan Watts on the work of Carl Jung.

So much magical thinking and inspiration.

One of a series of new works that relate to several early works and ongoing series which I began in 2014.

The first series explores the objectification of women, the relationships we hold as human beings to objects and domestic life and is entitled "Objectifications"; the second series explores the golden era of technicolor and film and the wonderment (distraction, captivation and opportunity for promotion of hidden agendas, capitalist ideals and propaganda) it provided and juxtaposes this sugary visual imagery with the harsh conditions brought about by the events of the late 30s and 40s and is called "Somewhere in Dreamland" - both bodies of work explore and question the vulnerability and inner strength of women.

A recent series "Conversations with my Inner Child" also informs these new works and aesthetic choices and my line of exploration here. The exploding lines and colours and pencil sketches are intended to be child-like and strike intentional reference to artists such as Judy Watson, Exene Cervenka, Louis Wain, Sister Mary Corita, Henry Darger and 1960s psychedelic poster designs. I expanded that line of questioning beyond the inner child therapy work I was undertaking and into the environment; contemplating the interior of these memory places, the objects they hold and the physical place some of those objects hold and keep all our lives. These works also question what emotional triggers are imbued within the object's form. Do these inanimate objects have auras?

What value do we assign the woman objectified - in the sexualised painting, in the car ad, in the 1940s film noir romance, in the domestic violence trial, in the supermarket with her kid screaming, our mothers and sisters, women we see as competition or opportunity, our female superiors... etc etc etc.


We also watched a fantastic documentary last night called !Women Art Revolution (filing that name is a Librarian's worst nightmare!). Such a great film, it "tracks the feminist art movement over 40 years through interviews with artists, curators, critics, and historians." The boys were actually super keen to learn more about the intersection of feminism and art.

Highly recommend all the above.

I am going to be posting more of my writing and theory on my website and hopefully publishing some of it along with two finished chapbooks of confessional poetry, in the coming months or years.

Kangaroo

Kangaroo skull in my Witch's Garden….


Rob found this last winter while walking round a nearby Billabong. We brought it home, thinking it would be a wonderful specimen to draw. I think the local fox has had a bit of a go at it. Should probably put it in our curiosity cabinet....

The Sacred Circle

The Sacred Circle. 2017

A work I created for an illustration project (natural history artwork) exploring fire ecology, and regeneration on a microcosmic scale...

"Throughout the world, in every culture, circles and rings have had a mythical potency for mankind since the earliest times. The spherical shapes of the sun, moon and earth and the natural cycle of the seasons formed the basis of many early rites and religions. As it was from these 'circles' that life itself derived, early peoples sought out other occurences of the magical shape in nature, as well as creating representations of it for themselves.

The circle is used as a symbol to signify love, protection, friendship, rebirth, and even life itself. From early Paganism the circle - whether in the form of ritual dances or symbolic decorations - has formed an important part of secular and religious ceremonies for many centuries.

.....

Wreath making is one of the most ancient of crafts and one which is inextricably entwined with Man's historic desire to recreate nature's own circles. Traditionally made from plants - as organic material formed into a circle was seen as a way of linking the maker and the wearer to everlasting life - such ancient symbols join us to the past and confirm our place in a centuries' old tradition."

An extract from Enchanted Circles by Elizabeth Jane Lloyd


A journey into the heart of the forest...

We woke at dawn and drove west at sunrise…


Such a long, wild, challenging and ethereal day, traipsing across country, communing with nature in Robbie's backyard, picking mushrooms, playing with fairy wrens, saluting the sun, telling stories, listening deeply - to each other's hearts - and healing ourselves through the experience.

Lying among the grass and wildflowers and eucalypts staring up at the sun and the clouds...

empty hand, full heart

I felt as if I had stepped into another realm - that of the fairies or nature spirits….

It was a truly extraordinary - hauntingly beautiful and simultaneously terrifying experience.

The Forked Fairy Tree - a portal to other realms perhaps?

Communing with nature has the power to bring such transcendental experiences.

I wept on Robbie's burnt floor, where he is so courageously rebuilding after a house fire, had an anaphylactic incident while we were on our way there (it happens relatively often as I react to sulphites) and spoke to the "green man" who lives in the birch tree nearby and watches over Robbie.

The burnt concrete floor of my friend’s perished house.

We were never intended to be shackled to the traps of society.

There are stories here, so much older and so much wiser. Robbie reminded me today, as those around me always do, that nature keeps such secrets and enfolds them back to us when we take time to listen.

Sea of Emotions

New work in progress....

The Doll's Aura, 2022. Work in progress. Watercolour, water soluable inks, gouache, prima coloured pencils, black permanent ink, graphite, pastels and charcoal. I brought out (almost the whole) art box!



I've been working on this piece for a couple of weeks now, building up layers, deepening tones, layering watercolour and ink and wash, adding detail then white-washing it (a hidden double entendre); it's an aura painting. It depicts the different human emotions I experienced during the past fortnight washing over her, like the ebb of a sea.

It's a reflection on the descriptive phrase "sea of emotions". I worked on this while conversing with friends, meditating, in the bath, listening to music, all the times I have felt happy, peaceful, loved and valued, uplifted, well and blissful.

I like how the shapes in her hair almost look like a Moulin Rouge dancer's feather headdress (of which I have made many in my previous life as costume maker - every girl wanted to be in Baz Lurman's film at the time!) The body is dark and burnt. Our wounds and expressing our pain does not make us victims. We are survivors. And we do not need to objectify ourselves to be seen. Love sees more. It is not our outer appearance that makes us beautiful; it is our souls. It is the authenticity of our beings, the colours and passions we bring to our lives, our darkness and our light - our wholeness - our courage and strength, our vulnerability, and often our humility (hence the doll is naked and nature - woodgrain reflecting the patterns of her aura).

She is whole.

Woman.

Standing in her power.

Woman reclaiming her standing as a transcendental being - sylphic and terrestrial (seventeen year old Ari gave me that word just now, when I asked him for a synonym of wooden or "of the earth"), omnipotent, sacred, flawed, tragic, balanced, magical, *as is*. As is.

This doll could be a tip shop find, destined for landfill, or someone's treasured companion. How she is perceived may depend on the eye of the beholder but even a burnt and battered old penny doll is a connected and significant part of the material and immaterial world.

Left in an attic she becomes a memory but in a child (or lover's) hand she is adored. In both situations she may be an object of affection, she exists and she may be loved. The difference is in one scenario she is unreal (hidden away) and in the other she is real (in front of our eyes).

Memento Mori

Memento Mori

“Death…it is an unavoidable part of life. Yet in modern human culture it’s a taboo subject, discussed only when necessary, and even then usually only in hushed whispers. Americans, in particular, are devoted to perpetuating the fantasy that you can stay young forever and live indefinitely, the narrative of eternal life scribed by theologians, who now pass the torch to transhumanist futurists and Big Pharma.” - The Occult Museum

Memento Mori is a philosophical term that reminds us of our transience on Earth, and serves as a warning to prepare ourselves for whatever other realm awaits us.

A memento mori is an artwork designed to remind the viewer of their mortality and of the shortness and fragility of human life. These pictures became popular in the seventeenth century, in a religious age when almost everyone believed that life on earth was merely a preparation for an afterlife. A basic memento mori painting would be a portrait with a skull but other symbols commonly found are hour glasses or clocks, extinguished or guttering candles, fruit, and flowers. - TATE Gallery

This current body of work is an exploration of this somewhat antiquated tradition of mourning symbolism

During the Victoria era the reality of death was embraced and the deceased was often immortalised by means of post-mortem photography and mourning paraphernalia.


Victorian Mourning Jewellery is most often associated with the Victorian period, popularised by Queen Victoria’s very public mourning after the death of Prince Albert in 1861.

For the next 40 years, until her own death, Queen Victoria wore nothing but black, and commissioned special jewellery pieces to commemorate Albert, as well as other beloved family members who had died, such as her mother and daughter, Alice. Many of these pieces were made from black stones like jet and onyx, and some incorporated a lock of hair or a photograph of the deceased, which were all design elements that became popular among the masses, though many opted for cheaper black materials like black glass (‘French jet’), enamel or vulcanite.

Mourning pieces weren’t necessarily all black, though, with surviving examples commonly incorporating agate, pearl, garnet, human hair, ivory and gold, making for some truly striking and beautiful items. Pearls were often incorporated into the jewels made to remember children as they symbolised tears, while white enamel was used to remember children and unmarried women.

Mourning jewellery pieces that have been passed down through families and survive to this day commonly feature an inscription, the initials of the loved one, a knot motif (often woven from hair), a small portrait photo or painting, or a silhouette of the deceased. Mourning jewellery can come in many different designs, but are most commonly brooches, rings, lockets and sometimes hair or tie pins. They will often feature strong symbolism such as crucifixes, flowers (especially the forget-me-not and the turquoise colour associated with this flower), angels, clouds, mourners sobbing at tombs, urns and weeping willows.


Perhaps the most characteristic of Victorian mourning jewellery is the use of human hair, often woven into intricate patterns or even to depict miniature scenes. It was also commonly braided into the chains that held watches or pendants. Victorians believed that human hair contained the essence of a person, and therefore had a sacred quality. It symbolised the deceased loved one’s essence, as well as immortality, since the hair survived long after the person is gone.

Interestingly, it was not only the hair of the loved one that was incorporated into memorial jewellery. At once stage during the Victorian era, England was importing 50 tons of human hair every year for the mourning jewellery industry, to supplement the strands provided by grieving family members. - Traces Magazine


The Three Graces

The Victorians were fond of sending covert sentimental messages hidden in flowers, gemstones, and cameo carvings. This tradition began somewhat earlier, during the High Renaissance, period but can be traced back through antiquity. The Three Graces or Charities were a popular theme of the Hellenistic revival through the late 18th century; their association with mourning can be gleaned from the below paragraph:

“All that we have to remember is that the bounty bestowed by the gods upon lower beings was conceived by the Neoplatonists as a kind of overflowing (emanatio), which produced a vivifying rapture or conversion (called by Ficino conversio, raptio or vivificatio) whereby the lower beings were drawn back to heaven and rejoined the gods (remeatio). The munificence of the gods having thus been unfolded in the triple rhythm of emanatio, raptio, and remeatio, it was possible to recognize in this sequence the divine model of what Seneca had defined as the circle of Grace: giving, accepting and returning.” Pagan mysteries in the Renaissance. Edgar Wind 1958

One of my favourite Renaissance Philosophers and an influential Humanist, Marcilio Ficino, also wrote: “All the parts of the splendid machine (machinae membra) are fastened to each other by a kind of mutual charity, so that it may justly be said that love is the perpetual knot and link of the universe: amor nodus perpetuus et copula mundi.”

"It's so sad that we don't understand that each moment of our lives– drinking coffee, walking down the street, reading the paper– is it. Why don't we grasp this truth? We don't get it because our little minds think that this second that we're living has hundreds of seconds that preceded it, and hundreds of seconds still to come. So we turn away from truly living our life."

–Happiness and How it Happens, Charlotte Joko Beck

Modern society has a difficult relationship with death. As a young woman and trained grief and loss volunteer support worker, I spent many years supporting families with terminally ill children - using the arts to assist the journey of parents and siblings through the illness and death of their children or siblings, to honour the memory of those who had passed through remembrance ritual, and to assist in processing and releasing their grief. Many of these families were isolated by their experiences of death - alienated and dispossessed by society.

In The Denial of Death, a book which I am currently reading, Ernest Becker writes: “Man is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with atowering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.”

In this era of pandemic and increasing authoritarian governance, our “death-fear” makes us vulnerable to the predatory nature of capitalist venture and the controlling power of others; Terror Management Theory (TMT) proposes “that a basic psychological conflict results from having a self-preservation instinct while realizing that death is inevitable and to some extent unpredictable. This conflict produces terror, which is managed through a combination of escapism and cultural beliefs that act to counter biological reality with more significant and enduring forms of meaning and value.” - Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Jeff Greenberg and Sheldon Solomon

Ernest Becker argues most human action is taken to ignore or avoid the inevitability of death.

It is this premise that forms the basis for TMT. TMT provides a framework by which we may seek to understand the anxiety experienced by individuals, communities and societies regarding death and mortality. It also provides insight into how such primal fear can be used to control and manipulate in a commercial and political capacity.

Themes on death, dying and mortality have woven their way through my artwork since its earliest incarnations.

Our relationship with mortality has been the subject of countless philosophical works, sculptures and paintings, songs and poems, cults and religious rituals, sacraments and prayers; it is also our greatest point of avoidance.

The Long Shadow

With my "Lucky Eight Ball" at the Royal Melbourne Show, 2012.

Photograph taken by his Father.

I have wrestled with honesty about this but so many of you have been honest with me and the honest thing is that alcoholism is the long and dark shadow which has hung over our lives and turned our dreams into nightmares. There have been other problems - trauma, illness, grief and loss, mental health, finance, housing, employment, emotional control - but all these obstacles may have been surmountable, the drinking was not. The drinking changed everything - it placed us in a constant State of Fear and has done so repeatedly throughout my life. I read a study through Covid that suggested an 80% correlation in cases of violence against women with drinking - not illicit substance abuse, the most legal of drugs - alcohol.

Alcoholism is a prolific issue in Australian culture but one that we rarely ,if ever, label or speak about. "Drinking" is ingrained within The Australian Colonial Project - used as a tool to annihilate, define, subordinate and exclude Indigenous Australia; a culture our ancestors carried forth from Greater Britain and the wider scope of Western Europe. It colonised life on these shores, appeased worker migrants, and colonised Australian women as well. In this country, today, there is hardly a 'Milk Bar' but there is a Pub (Public Bar) on just about every corner.

We cannot speak of family dysfunction without considering the role alcohol has played in forming modern society. It triggers deep cracks that reveal what lies beneath this drinking culture: 1. trauma - of those who drink and of those who tolerate others' drinking; 2. power - the bid for control - dominance, power over, exclusion, destruction, acquisition of resources, status, wealth, authority. These are the fundamental drivers, in my opinion, of such addiction and of violence at a micro and macro level - within the home, within the world. Yet alcohol is just one of many tools used to dominate, control and disempower.

Ten years ago and ten years is just about the exact amount of time it has taken to step out from that shadow and heal ourselves. We cannot speak of violence against women without considering the role alcohol has played in building modern society and the deep cracks it gives rise to. Where psychedelics may give rise to vivid and lucid manifestations of universal love or explorations of suffering, alcohol causes widespread suffering and it annihilates such love, from within. It is so highly addictive and an incredible painkiller - and so accessible - housed right there in it's own little pleasure cave beside the checkout. At one point an Ex of mine was coming home with a box of wine because it was only $2 a bottle and vodka can be bought for $29.99 at ALDI.

This is what destroyed us and what destroys so many families.

Alcohol is a “shadow” drug - a mind-killer and a common trigger for violent behaviour.

I see friends of mine, branching out into the world of alternative therapies - seeking to treat trauma with cannabinoid or psilocybin and creative healing strategies and the old establishment crying out against it still - peddling liquor and opiates and other triggers or mind blockers; Hell-bent on avoiding the Shadow Work that is necessary to lift us all out this old patriarchal pattern with it’s cycle of abuse and colonial mindset.

The Long Shadow is a work I created in response to these colonial trappings, last solstice, after taking a walk on privately owned sacred lands where there sits a beautiful Billabong and concrete throne between two volcanic peaks; unknown, undocumented, filled with native flora and fauna and targeted for development/ destruction.

Astounding ancient volcanic rock formations that are likely to be ploughed under any day.

Those rocks fell to the earth from the two volcanic craters, two peaks of a mountain ( I have not yet discovered its aboriginal name for), that we live between, a million years ago. They feel like sacred places but they exist on privately owned land that was once stolen from its traditional custodians and they are unprotected.

And I am at a loss to know how to protect such sacred spaces - internally and externally.

It is breaking my heart to watch our beautiful grasslands being ploughed under.

I have been reading a lot about Eco-feminism - I feel a strong kinship between the fate of vulnerable and the fate of the land; when I walk in such places I feel like all my ancestors and the ancestors of others are walking with me, seeking a path forward, a way to throw off these shackles and to live a life of unity, love and solidarity.

SHE WITCH

One of a series of self portraits I took playing around in the garden last Spring.

I had decided to start a new Insta blog - SHE WITCH and these images were my first posts.

This coming Spring, I am hoping to launch a small collections of artist designs under this label.

Think: Jan Švankmajer's "Alice" dressed in a Gunne Sax/ Op Shop/ Dirndl/ Laura Ashley ensemble finds herself lost in a hybrid landscape of the Australian Bush morphed with the German forest where she meets Dot and the Kangaroo who lead her into a modern Witch's garden planted on ancient Sacred Lands.

Now to translate all that into a series of hats, dresses and dolls....


I've been spending a lovely Winter morning here in my own witch's garden - raking up leaves, tidying the flower beds, clipping the long Winter grasses, pruning the trees and bushes.... dreaming about Spring.

The Blue Fairy

One of the highlights of my life.

As close as I have ever come to the big lights!

I was asked to model the blue fairy's costume for the pantomime Pinocchio. It was before the role was cast and they needed someone tiny and fairylike to fit into the costume and Mandy, my friend and millinery mentor suggested me. I was 22 or 23 and I loved all things whimsy and she said she thought it would delight me. So there I was, wearing a wooden mask, on a billboard above Flinder's St Station, Melbourne. And I got to see this projection of myself, as The Blue Fairy - the guiding light - one of my childhood loves, when I went up to work with Mandy Murphy in her studio in the Nicholas building for a good few weeks. I am certain I still have a flyer somewhere among my treasured bits and pieces. The pantomime industry was closing down in Melbourne at this time. I think it had been my dream, always, to work on old-fashioned pantomimes. I have, pinned to my dressing table, The Blue Fairy's tiny prototype wings.... a gift from Mel, the costume maker and a kind and wise friend.

Back then, around the turn of the Milenium, I would pack up my busking kit 0n weekends - a gold costume for Titania Queen of the Fairies (from Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’) and stand in the Bourke St Mall, playing a Living Statue. I loved that life! I traveled, once, as an adult to Europe and stood on La Strada in Barcelona amid my performing kinfolk. On my last night there I got offered a home, a bar job, and a group of beautiful friends. I thought about it - how easily I could make a costume. But the winds were calling me home.

One month later I fell pregnant with my son, Ariel Gray - and life changed forever. Knowing him and loving him is the greatest fairytale I could ever live. And everyone told me not to! Told me not to "go through with it" but something moved deep within my heart, a deep knowing, a deepest love. So I held my own hand, and I leapt, and I did the bravest thing I know how to do in this world - I brought forth life. There are many ways to walk in this world and many paths to lead us… what is right for us may not be that way for others but it is that uniqueness and the wonderful difference. that - rainbow of diversities - that paints this world all the beautiful colours it is.

Chocolate

Dr Oetker stovetop chocolate pudding with a sprinkling of demerara sugar... takes me back to childhood. Now we are watching Chocolat. I (almost) forgot how wonderful this film is. But not quite. "Mademoiselle.... Oh Monsieur, I've never been married!" Says the wild and wonderful and witchy single Mama in her beautiful handmade red dress.

Shadow Play

Another little project I'm excited about is this series of photographic ‘Shadow Portraits’ that I have edited and uploaded. These were taken through the Covid Pandemic - Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring, I've been adding these and more of my photography work, stretching back over 25 years to my art school work here.

Angel

Photography has always felt the most accessible and immediate of art forms to me.

Over the decades, I have attempted to capture that which is fleeting and transitory by nature - reflections in rainwater, the play of light and shadow as the sun moves across the sky - changing rapidly from one moment to the next; hands full of petals, light streaming through branches, my own image reflected - ephemeral and mutable; and the dance of the seasons, of the planets, of the aeons - all filtering through the camera lens and human eye as the psyche searches for patterns, for symbols: gleaning the beauty of nature and wonder at Life on Earth. I reach for my camera, as the muse takes me, recording that which would otherwise be lost to ephemera.

Many moons ago, when it was all silver paper and darkrooms and analogue techniques, I studied photography as part of a Visual Arts qualification. Over the years, I have captured hundreds of thousands of images - both analogue and digital - using polaroid cameras, digital and analogue SLRs, “point and shoots”, phones and disposables. For me, spontaneity is the golden key; since graduating, the images I capture are rarely staged or contrived. The art of taking photos has played a significant part, not only as a tool but as a medium, emanating through my art praxis.

As a young woman, I dreamt of becoming a Photo Journalist and travelling to wilder places - in search of truth. That spirit spurs me on in my existential pursuit of beauty and spiritual exploration of duality. I loved National Geographic Magazines as a child and had an extensive collection once dating back decades that I would scour in search of knowledge and inspiration. I have a fondness for portraiture and documentary photography and appreciate the work of photographers such as Sally Mann, Diane Arbus, Dorothe Lange, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Man Ray, Robert Doisneau, Robert Mapplethorpe (particularly his altars, Erwin Blumenfeld, the film work of Ana Mendieta and Earth art by Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy, the theatrical works of Tim Walker and contemporary artist Brooke Shaden, Agnieszka Motyka and Caryn Drexl, and fashion photographers such as Wendy Bevan and Ellen Rogers.

You can view a selection of my photography work here.

Wintering

Our Winter Garden. Through my eyes and through our bedroom windows...

Vessels

As I've been sorting through my body of work, back to 2020, I see a lot of common and familiar themes emerging.

Containment, objectification of the female form, sexuality, interior/ exterior, connection to the natural world and its symbols - flowers. pearls, butterflies and other insects, water and the four elements, birds, horses, the wild and the cultivated, possession/s, objects, artefacts from the natural world - eggs, stones, nests, feathers, wildflowers, leaves, comets, blossom, branches, dolls and dollhouses, wearable art/tefacts, the body in states of emotional repose - grieving, dancing, the turning of the seasons - hearts and tears - these experiences .... so vast... filtering through the introspective window of reflection that this pandemic forced open on my life and my past and present: the myriad lives and loves that I have lived, parts played, lessons learned, paths crossed or uncrossed - an enduring pursuit of the road less taken.

The way of the artist.

I've been living this life at least 25 years now but in honesty, I've always treaded it. Taking my experiential memories and spinning them into something tangible, something tactile... eliciting, almost, a subdued Pavlovian response - tinted with visceral emotion - rendering resting tacets of beauty that divine the human condition. In this way, I move across the landscape of the world, endeavoring to make some sense of it all as I flit from moment to moment - keenly aware of my own mortality. What I watch, what I read, what I .... know... all of it falls upon the page, upon the screen - ten thousand photographs, a flurry of poems, a suite of drawings, a costume, a ritual, a prayer, a collage, a statue, an embrace….

And who shall wear the starry crown

As I went down in the river to pray

Studying about that good old way

And who shall wear the starry crown

Good Lord, show me the way !

O sisters let's go down,

Let's go down, come on down,

O sisters let's go down,

Down in the river to pray.

As I went down in the river to pray

Studying about that good old way

And who shall wear the robe and crown

Good Lord, show me the way !

O brothers let's go down,

Let's go down, come on down,

Come on brothers let's go down,

Down in the river to pray.

As I went down in the river to pray

Studying about that good old way

And who shall wear the starry crown

Good Lord, show me the way !

O fathers let's go down,

Let's go down, come on down,

O fathers let's go down,

Down in the river to pray.

As I went down in the river to pray

Studying about that good old way

And who shall wear the robe and crown

Good Lord, show me the way !

O mothers let's go down,

Let's go down, don't you want to go down,

Come on mothers let's go down,

Down in the river to pray.

As I went down in the river to pray

Studying about that good old way

And who shall wear the starry crown

Good Lord, show me the way !

O sinners let's go down,

Let's go down, come on down,

O sinners let's go down,

Down in the river to pray.

As I went down in the river to pray

Studying about that good old way

And who shall wear the robe and crown

Good Lord, show me the way !

A few photographs of quiet moments from our week away accompanied by the lyrics to "Down to the River to Pray" or "Come, Let Us All Go Down", a traditional American song variously described as a Christian folk hymn, an African-American spiritual, an Appalachian song, and a Southern gospel song. The exact origin of the song is unknown but it feels fitting for the collective re-awakening we shared. I was singing this quietly in my head down at the old dam - wading in the water, listening to birdcalls, watching the sun set.



The Truth Is Out There

This work is tiny, 15 x 17. 5 cm.

I began this at dawn yesterday, worked on it all day while homeschooling my son (who was also drawing), and finished it early this morning. It took about twelve dedicated hours to complete. I like working like this but I often think others, who perhaps don't draw, don't realise just how much time and thought is involved in the execution of a drawing. I'll probably come back to it yet. adding highlights, emphasising dark points and shadows .... sometimes I need to sit with things a while before I am satisfied that they are finished.

This new work ties in with my recent series, which is still untitled. I have several series, in several different media on the go - Tears, begun in 2019, The Book of Shadows, begun in 2020 (which feels completed as a set of 40 collages, but may inform larger painted or mixed media pieces) and Love Letters, also 2020, Vessels, begun 2021, and now this series of surreal interiors which I have been affectionately calling The Dream House. There are a few series, dating well back a decade or so, that I also intend to continue on with - a series called Objectifications, another (which feels poignant just now with the Ukraine-Russia conflict, on war) called Somewhere in Dreamland, that I began in 2014, in response to the Syrian conflict, and another idea that came to me around the same time entitled The Other, exploring Xenophobia/ Shadows.

I often take my lead from the Surrealists in terms of "making the familiar strange and revealing hidden desires" but rather than rebelling against the subconscious and seeking a political stance, I seek to subvert the current of cultural narrative through my use of imagery and the juxtaposition of objects and symbolism. This piece continues my exploration of storytelling, myth-making, conspiracy theory, fairytales, the place of dreaming in the waking world, folklore and the shadows of everyday life and human culture.

My current creative practice is informed by many activities from watching a doco on Andy Goldsworthy to reading the science fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, and (of course) with a definitive nod to The X Files, and @russellbrand's podcasts. The prominent cross of the window pane is an intentional nod to Christianity, as well as the diversity of belief systems - positioned among the many trees of a wild Australian bush/ forest.