About a decade ago I was giving an artist’s talk in Nashville in front of my work, ‘The Long Awaited’. A woman came up to me afterwards and told me that she really connected to the work. Her mother had recently died and she had adopted a dog and she told me that she had needed to learn dog language.
It was one of those intimate moments you can have with strangers where you totally connect. It didn’t have to go anywhere else, it was just that one moment of sharing an experience and an understanding. I never forgot what she said about learning dog language.
When my family got a rescue cat during COVID we too had to learn a new language. It reminded me of when our children were born and I was so worried about being able to understand what they were trying to say to us.
After living with the cat for a while, I realised that he kept slowly blinking at us when he was relaxed. I bought a Japanese book on speaking to cats to help me understand him and I learned that he was smiling at us. This knowledge made me feel really happy in a time of deep gloom. After a while I found I was cat smiling myself, not just at the cat but at people too.
To me there is something very wonderful about even this most rudimentary of interspecies communication. It simultaneously highlights the possibility of connecting beyond ourselves but also the uniqueness of the the different ways in which we experience the world. I don’t think I’ll ever really understand what my cat is thinking - how it actually feels to be him - but at the same time there is a genuine sharing of feeling between us. I like the idea that we don’t need to be the same in order to share the world together, we just need a small moment of shared understanding: an eye-blink smile.
The works in this exhibition all attempt to capture the intrinsic optimism of this idea. They try to coax such moments from the interplay of making and medium, to reconcile the supposedly disparate interests of materiality and action, abstraction and figuration. This is where the glass works connect with the works on paper, and even the silicone sculpture.
With the works on paper I begin with shapes and colour, flowing out from a somewhat uncontrolled drawing process, which I later overlay with a number of iconographies that I find myself drawn back to again and again. I often draw birds, and in these works I have focused on the “Superb Fair Wren” which is both native and common in Australian cities. They are more commonly known as ‘blue wrens’ because of the male’s beautiful blue plumage. What I recently discovered is that these blue feathers are only worn during the mating season, to attract mates. During the fertile months they go from plain brown to brilliant blue, which I think is amazing. They do it even though it makes them more vulnerable to predators. However, it is worth it to be beautiful.
The extraordinary, colourful alchemy of glass itself is at the heart of the Breathbloom and Lighthaven works in this exhibition. Hand-blown glass is almost a perfect metaphor for my conceptual interests. These are luminously colourful objects produced by the interplay of terrific heat and human breath, constrained in this case by a constantly changing steel mould. The works capture a moment when these elemental forces are guided by human actions in a way that is more about cooperation than control. Like most of my work, they try to reconcile and blend oppositions; their visual lightness contrasting with their physical weight, their simple abstract colourfulness contrasting with the extraordinary skill of their creation. They are bubbles made of molten sand.
The figurative sculptures reflect a love of detail and care of making that you can see in the meticulous drawings of birds and hair in the works on paper. This is very much about care, on every level. They are representations of the idea and value of care and caring for others, and at the same time they are products of equally careful approaches to making. All of these works embody a respect for both material and processes, and by extension the experience of those who view them. The work that goes into them is an offering to the audience and to the world.
For me, all of these works are connected by this attitude to making, as well as by a very self-conscious optimism. I hope that they can evoke a sense of the possibility of connection, with others and with the world around us.
