Wendy Stavrianos
Jul 12 - Aug 06
The Gathering Fields
Selected Works from Mt. Gaspard Studios 2003 - 2006
There is a South American form called a "Cordell" where a
person makes an image linking it with a poem in response to a deeply
felt feeling or an important event. These works from my Mt. Gaspard
studios were made in that spirit; in response to deeply felt moments
in landscape, places I have worked in and gathered in.
A recent residency at Arthur Boyd's Bundanon has revived my early Darwin
form of working in pen and ink and canvas in response to the "wet"
landscape of that area. After the many years of living with the drought
that affects central Victoria where I have over time come to terms with
the "dry," I have celebrated the gold of those summer grasses.
This exhibition deals with those dualities, the psychological split
between abstraction and representation, city and country, space and
its various forms pitted against each other; one reality against another,
dark against light, the 'field' - literal and metaphorical. These are
the ideas that excite me.
Like a "Cordell,"
I make an image that responds to a deeply felt moment, gathering to
me (like a bower bird), objects, plants, animals, bones, feathers, etc.
as seen in The Gathering pouches. They have presented themselves to
me on walks over many landscapes from Darwin to Canberra, the south
coast of New South Wales, Lake Mungo, Nowra to Harcourt, Victoria and
to my own road, Mt. Gaspard, that runs alongside my studio.
I have become "the Gatherer" as we are all "gatherers,"
a symbol I feel for this time, where the lack of connection to the earth
is tenuous, where many people spend most of their lifetime staring at
computer or television screens.
The Gathering Fields are
experiences of land, gathering and connecting, with a deep engagement
of vision, mind and memory. Then, like the "Cordell," they
are records of the feeling and the importance of their existence in
a timeless act of making an image. I want to convey in the work some
of the mystery of the place, the space, object, or creatures I have
encountered.
The Gatherer in the work, whether it is The Gleaner by Jean Francois
Millet or my own symbol of the gatherer or the bird gatherer, has the
same meaning of celebration or environmental concern for what is being
lost with global warming. The Gatherer is about restoration and our
links to the history of connection to the earth, to the timelessness
of that act of engagement with its ancient mysteries, like the deep
spring embedded in the rock that has sustained human beings through
time.
Wendy Stavrianos, Harcourt, 2006
