‘Dusk’
ANCA Gallery June 2021
2020 ushered in a cascade of droughts, fires, toxic smoke and the COVID pandemic. I watched my immediate family respond fearfully and angrily to these shudders of a dying ecosystem. With the globe spiralling into an unprecedented future, here, in relatively affluent and safe Australia, we continue to live our lives and dream our dreams, almost oblivious - semi-awake.
Each member of my family inhabits each day vibrantly within the material world of purposeful work, play, love and community, and each night falls through the rabbit hole into that other life, mysterious, outside rational time and space, perhaps essential for mulling on the anxieties from the outside world, perhaps symbolic, perhaps, as ancient peoples believed, auguries to be interpreted. In this time of events previously beyond belief, I mine the significant dreams of my family members, those dreams that have recurred again and again through the years, almost desperately searching for omens.
The two surrealities - the global catastrophe and the vibrational dream existence - oscillate like DNA strands in these charcoal explorations.
Image credits: Brenton McGeachie
Below:
4 x family portraits with climate change issues overlaid, black and white charcoal on Arches paper, range from 102 x 201 cm to 210 x 247 cm;
4 dream drawings from dream narratives related by family members, black and white charcoal on Arches paper, each 67 x 408 cm.
12 x ‘stump’ drawings, charcoal on paper, each 30 x 2 cm;
