Acquisition, while the mountains had feet
(2020-2022), National Gallery of Victoria
+++ full suite of works acquired in 2022
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(In pandemic time), through grief and chaos and the madness of it all, walking lent great comfort day and night. When the clocks had lost their hours and worlds lay away like distant planets, everyone was solacing in being held this way; roads and paths carried all our drifting bodies. By 2021, my feet had carried me eight times around the globe already, tailing the haze that had befallen everything. Seasons had long assumed events; coming apart and re-assembling in novel ways, a kind of measure by which to navigate the trembling present. There were five kilometres where we belonged, between the river and the sea. Love was in a closer way; it was a time of endings and beginnings, loss and change. I saw ants carry their dead, foxes cross the road at midnight. I saw trees grow, birds cloak together on branches in the cold. I saw everything touched by everything else. Farther, snow came and went at least one hundred times. It helped to seek to be as liquid as one could – to conjure and collapse and yield in one perpetual commotion. To flow without our bodies to the sun; unresidential, and mutual to everything. No one knew how many years would pass this way. Were we awake or dreaming?
Using fragments and slippages to suggest narrative spaces, communities and lived experiences that are allied, fluid and multiplicit, mountains invites migrant pieces from four different bodies of work (all made since 2020) into a dialogical ontology. The wall holds their fellowship. The gathering of works creates extended imaginaries with my immediate communities, all the while positing the neighbourhood as an inner-city mini-ecology in which non-humans and humans are in near muster (together rather than apart). The hyper-local is the centre stage; on it tales of entanglement, relation, connection and intimacy unfold. Here loves, neighbours, animals, streets and parks of my suburb are the main protagonists, reminding that the close is revelatory and never fully known. Leaning against the shadows, mountains is a conversation of kinship, grief, repair and shelter.
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