Sculptural Work
A recurring theme of my art practice has been displacement, entwined with experimentation of how ones’ personal objects and images can be highly emotive.
Now in my second year of my Master of Fine Arts at National Art School, I experimented last year with different ways of artmaking that spoke to me about the emotional history of objects. Personal objects that surrounded me as a child in the home of my migrant parents, valued in ways outside dollar worth. The works here are an expression of my first year journey into this research.
Photos of my family are re-presented in drawings and plates. The figures, characters in an imagined past, like a documentary re-enactment of the world my parents inhabited before they arrived here. Shoes have always featured in my work. A motif I recently thought may have emerged as I was processing my mother arriving as a migrant in Sydney with only one pair. Contrasted against her almost pathological, insatiable buying of multiple shoes even as she sails past 80 years. The porcelain buildings are reflecting the aftermath of war, empty and fragile.
These pieces and threads of ideas move towards my final MFA project due in October.
Not all of these works will be presented then which is why I chosen to exhibition them now.
In the words of the poet George Oppen ; There are Things we Live Among,
This exhibition reflects on the spaces that we inhabit physically and psychologically. I look at the quite aloneness people experience in new spaces and places that are foreign to them. These figures are post war migrants inhabiting a shifting landscape.