JULY 15, 2022 - AUGUST 20, 2022
Sitting quietly, doing nothing
Spring comes and
The grass grows by itself
Matsuo Basho
After the slow, internal atmosphere of Winter, Spring arrives with it’s playful buoyancy. In times of difficulty it can be hard to recall that nothing is static and that change will inevitably come.
Over the past few years, we have individually and collectively been living through some difficult times. Bushfires, lockdowns, pandemic, floods, social and political division, a housing crisis and a distant war with far reaching consequences. As we imbibe these predicaments through the steady drip feed of social media and news feeds, we can become sodden by these dark burdens and forgetful that beauty and joy are also parts of the human repertoire of experience.
In 2020 I committed to a daily meditation practice, which has become an ever-blossoming source of insight. Every morning I observe the nature of change through my own internal experience. Thoughts, feelings and sensations arrive and disperse, all beyond my control and intention. There is an inherent beauty in coming to recognise this. The moods of the mind change continuously, like the seasons and weather. To sit quietly, observing their cycles and movements is a deceptively powerful (non) action.
The works in this exhibition are an expression of this unfolding process, they portray an emergence from the quiet, internal depths to the vibrant, uncoiling that we see in the season of Spring. They are abstractions that perhaps offer glimpses of a bird in flight, a passing cloud or a flower opening its petals to the sun. They are an ode to the natural world and its timeless capacity to evoke awe and wonder.
These sculptural paintings have evolved through a series of impulses and processes that have been intuitively followed. A play of darkness and light, layering and sanding back, a combined use of glazes and thick paint which reveal and obscure, mark making that is both physical and considered. A variety of approaches have been utilised to express the disparate but connected parts of the whole.
Emma Walker, 2022