Exhibition Opening night | Wednesday 10 May | 5:30 - 7:00pm
Gallery F opening hours | Thurs-Frid 10-4pm | Sat 10am-2pm
Location: mim, museum of innocence mildura | 31-33 Deakin Ave
Artist will be in
residence continuing on with the production of her work in the gallery space
each Friday and Saturday for the month of May. You can support her by dropping
to say hello and see the work in progress during this time.
Artist statement
'Landscape has
entered a kind of force upon me that is every bit as geological as family'
Tim
Winton from Island Home: A Landscape Memoir
Uplifted is a visual investigation into the experience and the aftermath of
uncontrollable and sudden weather events such as floods or severe thunderstorms
and their residue, which can manifest themselves both physically and
emotionally. A neologism for this is Solastalgia, a word coined by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2003 which
relates to one’s home environment when it is
damaged or degraded; put simply it
is the ‘homesickness you have when you are still at
home’. The concept of Solastalgia also suggests that
due to a greater frequency of earth related distress everything that was once
familiar and trusted in our environment will be experienced as the “new
abnormal” as development and climate pressures continue to build.
The title of the exhibition comes from an exact
moment of being caught in a storm with my daughter, 100 km per hour wind gusts
giving us the sensation of leaving the ground and being propelled forward. Both
of us felt elated by the force of the experience until a large tree became
uprooted and fell right in front of us. Our elation quickly turned to confusion
and fear.
The physical aftermath contained in the images
depict massive uprooted trees, debris along with flooded and swollen
backwaters. My emotional mediation on these images saw them as symbols of my
daughter leaving our family home to embark on the next part of her life’s
journey and my own motherly surprise at feeling swollen and homesick at her
physical loss from me. Literally she has been uprooted from me and lifted away
to her new ‘place’.
Toy
and handmade cameras have been used as a mode of image capture that plays with
a sense of worry for humanity not taking runaway climate change events
seriously enough to address our precarious existence on this planet but instead
treating it more like a game.
