JUNE 3, 2022 - JULY 9, 2022
“When I was a child, the bush spoke to me. She called me often. Everything in the natural world had a language; the trees, birds, hills; their foreign tongues animated and interwoven with purpose; exotic and intoxicating. Mine was the least understood. I would follow the thread of their whispers for hours and miles, meandering through the scrub uninhibited as only a child can, beckoned forward in a light-headed promise of discovery and otherworld enchantment.”
Lori Pensini was fortunate to experience a rural childhood fringed by nature reserves. In this place of infinite discovery, everything in nature was given equal voice. This exhibition chronicles her childhood wanderings, and the development of her own language of botanical visual metaphor which pays homage to the virtues and characteristics of all living things.
While Pensini’s ‘language of flowers’ invites the viewer to “recollect and reconnect to the internal self”, the birds in her work refer to relationships, often portraying matriarchal women from her past and present. She refers to birds as being “critical in the balance of the natural systems, so too the consequential role of women in nurturing family culture.”
The figures in this body of work are principally a combination of family and friends, interwoven and regenerated as self-portraits, while the panoramic big-sky landscapes are a tribute to Pensini’s grandparents. She describes family as integral to her story making, and of inherited memories which strengthen the bonds of family culture.
