Page 22 - invisible cities 2009

for more than twenty years I have
made paintings about the way that people connect with place and how they build relationships with the world around them. I paint my life as I move through the world now and as I remember the tracks of past lives. I paint these remembered traces as being mine, from some years ago; but sometimes they are the traces I imagine to be left by mythical or historical Uigures. Saint Sebastian, Jane, Lady Franklin, or, as in this exhibition, Marco Polo and Kublai Khan in Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities
I have just returned from two years in
the United Kingdom, where I spent
three months at Cambridge University
as Artist in Residence at The Scott
Polar Research Institute. Here I studied
the letters and diaries of Jane Franklin during the day and wandered the streets of the historical city alone, often in the early hours of the morning.
For twelve months I also undertook a residency at a boarding school in the Cotswolds in rural Oxfordshire. Living amongst rolling green Uields and woodlands in a seventeenth century Quaker village in the very heart of England, was strange and dreamlike and left me out of time with the rest of the world, but in time with my internal thoughts and memories. During this period we also travelled extensively through England and Ireland and many symbols of invasion and defense in these paintings - battlements, churches, Ulags and watchtowers - are drawn from the weeks spent in Derry/Londonderry County Antrim, Killyleagh and Donegal.
The incongruity of Britains rural and urban landscapes parellels the incogruity of its historical symbols of power, war, authority and beauty. These, in turn, mix with my reUlections on Australia’s indigenous and European history, areas of wilderness and the sense of space and silence that inUiltrate our landscapes and cities in this country. In these paintings the architecture of the city is becoming
dominant, but it is also moving inside - so in some paintings the external world dominates the interior space, making the Uigures more about their ‘attitude’ in relation to their context than about personal characteristics. This is a link to medieval paintings, as is the re-introduction of gold leaf which have long been a source of inspiration for me. The presence of boats, bridges,railway stations, all can come to symbolise a means of movement; one world to another, one time to the next.
I hope this exhibition expresses the idea of a city made up of memories, experiences, images and dreams of many cities, a city that is also known and owned by one person alone; one person walking the streets at dawn, before the city wakes; when ita buildings and streets and roads and rivers can be possessed and Uilled up with songs and memories and love and sadness. A city where everything dissolves into everything else; where walls become trees, icebergs Uloat down the Thames, watchtowers look out over falling snow and where cathedrals tower below secret rooms that let you look out
across the world you have created, a world that is yours alone.
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