Submission to Mornington Works on Paper Exhibition 2024
Artist’s Statement
A Tale of Tears explores an ongoing desire to understand the world through my mediums: paper, paint, fabric and thread. Water colour, tissue and Japanese rice paper are foundational to this work: war vocabulary lurks beneath a collaged terrain, paper scraps notated with wars support the boot, tears stream from a paper body.
As a child, I dragged my feet in the flying boots my father wore in planes that dropped bombs, saw photographs of bomb-scarred landscapes and watched war films. Daily, I am a witness to wars that speak of the inability of humans to resolve the legacy of past histories, the Territorial Imperative and religious differences.
Encapsulated in hand-stitched organdy are the historical traces of human aggression, aggression that leads to the armed defense of human rights. Inevitably there is death, perpetual suffering and nurtured within that suffering are the seeds of new wars. There is no escape.
