Page 3 - Voyages of deire catalogue P D F

In London you see history and narrative laying one on top of the other. A city that has been lost and won, burnt, bombed and shattered by poverty and disease for centuries. In Sydney, they say that if you listen hard enough you can hear the rustling of money. Here in London, if you listen hard enough, you can hear the millions who have gone before you.
I found the influence of this patchwork city liberating. It is a place where history is valued and allowed, where the old and the new rub shoulders not in rivalry but with a sense of being part of an ongoing story. This feeling crept into my art like a sliver of ice into my burning soul: in London, I felt allowed. The Thames has come to belong uniquely to me I find myself thinking with ease. I have every right to call it my own - it comes as a reflection of the Franklin River in Tasmania.
Black swan. White Swan
The research at Cambridge University was the balance to my close connection with this external world around me: the other side of the landscape. It was an interior world where I sat straining to decipher manuscripts that were almost illegible, and where I spent long hours looking at oil paintings and drawings.
In the end, it was the stories that circled the main event which were the most illuminating: the described sightings, by whalers, of two ships encased in an enormous iceberg ( a painting I have still not made) ; the prophecies and visions of a young girl in which she describes her dream of ‘two bloons’ and ‘a pillar of fire in the snow’. These were reports received by Jane in London, during her decade long, lonely, search for her husband John, lost in the ice of the North West Passage. Jane had never seen the landscape of the Northern Ice.