LANDSCAPE AND MEMORY SERIES
A memory always has a ‘place’ attached to it. When you experience a ‘place’ empirically it brings with it personal associations, emotional and conceptual correlatives that generate individual memories. My current body of work stems from an ongoing interest in the confluence of landscape and memory. The mind presents us with a view, a perception of an objective external reality that over time becomes a recollection. My encaustic paintings depict the landscape of Wiradjuri Country in New South Wales. I take photographs, manipulate them, and in going from personal experience of the landscape, to viewing it through a camera lens, manipulating the image in raster programs, composing a schema, then physically laying down layers of wax, I am expressing a memory of that place.
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These are the landscapes where my mother (now deceased) and my indigenous Wiradjuri ancestors lived. I am paying homage to layers of history, much like an excavation beneath the surface of what is seen. The application of molten wax replicates the topography and provides a depiction of scenes that are much like a memory in that they both depict ‘traces’. The ethereal, translucent nature of wax reflects the nature of memory in the way it is ‘coloured’ by the mind. My mother’s stories about living in the country have become merged with my memories of her and the land.
This work is professionally framed in a light oak/beech wood.