PAUSE explores ideas of concealment, part autobiographical and part universal. The reclaimed wool blankets filled with their histories of domesticity, institution and the fragility of a permanent home wrap the portraits concealing the anxiety of social unrest and global pandemic.
The start of 2019 found me in a small room with an air purifier surrounded by a thick relentless smoke haze that eventuated in an evacuation call to abandon my home, closely followed by a nation-wide lockdown. This period of isolation allowed me unprecedented time and I began to create small ink portraits that drew on a tender balance between a private and greater universal consciousness. Five distinct recollections dissolved into muscle memory, slow and cathartic hand stitch rhythms created unconscious patterns and story lines on the emerging self-portraits.
BACKGROUND
I was born in the town of Ambato, Ecuador. In 1972 I immigrated with my family to Sydney under the Whitlam government open immigration initiative. In 1989 I graduated from the ANU School of Art & Design. In 2016 after 40 years in Australia I returned to Ecuador, this pilgrimage allowed me to investigate my first nations heritage and the history of my family which previously had existed only in my childhood memories and through the dark glass of my mother’s displacement and the magic realism of South American literature and visual arts that I had absorbed. My childhood experience was dominated by the women in my family however there was an ever-present patriarchy, that lay over the continent like a large blanket, at its best indifferent to misogynist social norms and at its worst a toxic masculinity violent and oppressive. For the past thirty years my artworks have encompassed site-specific installations and mixed media sculptures. At the heart of my art practice is a commitment to recycling, up-cycling, and transforming found and everyday objects into the building blocks for my artworks. This ethos was central to my upbringing and stands in contrast to my experience of the throw away consumer culture of urban Australia. Over the years many of these found and discarded objects have started to have inherent antique value, subsequently I have moved to the more domestic and mundane materials, primarily wool blankets with their embedded human history.
