Artist Statement

Exhibition 2021 – Randal Studio, Brisbane Botanical Gardens, Mt Cootha

‘…all life is one, and all is change.

With beat of systole and of diastole
One grand great life throbs through earth’s giant heart,
And mighty waves of single Being roll
From nerve-less germ to man, for we are part
Of every rock and bird and beast and hill,
One with the things that prey on us, and one with what we kill.

– Oscar Wilde

I guess this exhibition is about the things we do (our actions) and design to understand nature and therefore to underline our connection.  We have this undeniable connection which is at times spiritual, fun, fearful, playful, ethereal, ephemeral, etc and yet to me it is always an interpretation; a code; a language; a semiotic. 

Reggio Emilia has at its core the child and how the child interprets the world through the hundred languages meaning that there is a multiple of ways to make meaning and communicate meaning through the senses.  Humans filter things, create a ‘code’ and say that this is what it is when in fact it is all a perspective and it seems to me that we do that with our understanding of nature.  I have taken stylized designs of nature throughout history and across cultures as a metaphor, and a code we create.  I have used the gorgeous small bodies and faces of young children to add to the metaphor of where I suggest that understanding to be. 

Tennyson from The Princess

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower – but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.