The exhibition Ever Closer continued a recent theme in my work exploring the notion that the future is the past and that all life is cyclical. It comprised 9 works, a series of 3 sets of 3, based on our country's colonial migration and settlement, but in a wider context as a metaphor for man's time on earth. The title for me has several layers of meaning: the ever closer of the subject matter within each series from the general to the detailed, the journey from a distant perspective to the intimacy of a detailed still-life of the subject, showing that it's the little things that make up the whole. A journey through time, our history from the time before our arrival, as we travelled from other shores, getting closer and closer to the land until we became part of it, making our mark on it and leaving reminders of our lives behind; leading to the return - the fact that our destiny is gradually moving closer from our colonisation and settlement of the land to our eventual exit. This is the meaning in the final series The Return - it is a return to paradise, after man has gone, and our past becomes our future. Nature takes over again, and it returns to how it was. It is my optimistic hope that this is how we will leave the Earth, not a devastated blackened Armageddon, but that man's presence will just disappear, leaving the Earth - eventually - as we found it. So there is an optimism and hope in these works, as well as a celebration of our beautiful country (planet) and for the people who settled it. |
