Dancing in the Desert

13 - 29 November

Carmel McCrow

Artist's talk 4:00pm Saturday 21st November

Having long felt an instinctive pull to experience the desert areas of Central Australia, my experience came in 2008. First impressions were of the mammoth solidity of this spiritually powerful land, later revealing issues of transience and fragmentation. Within the myriad intimate universes, the awareness of elemental forces was foremost. Millions of years of climatic aberrations reveal the stony fabric of this continent.

Unshaded rocks crack open in the furnace of relentless sun and wind. Fractured rocks exposed to weathering, fall apart, revealing their core patterning. The variety, size and complexity created by the geometry and light have produced spectacular and intricate patterns of relief. Then as the light changes, the interplay of images changes, and the eye begins a process of adaptation.

Increasingly, I found periods of being struck by the aliveness of the land. There appeared layers of representation, ranging from those that can be sensed intellectually, visually and with the tactile senses, to those experienced more emotionally. We tend to look primarily for images that we recognise, and that relate to our own perceptions of the world. In these surroundings, where aeons of water and wind are the sculptors, combined with a garish palette of ironstone pigments, a surreal quality is bestowed on its commonplace elements.

Underlying this, was a reassuring echo, reinforcing human connection with the land and a subtle and nurturing, spiritual presence, which became palatable. Slowly at first, it infused me with a gentle feeling of serenity, growing to an overwhelming joy, which actually had me 'dancing in the desert'.

This intense feeling has led to the desire to create works, based on the fascination of what the light and topography might suggest. Lifted by a breeze and lit by polarized light, grains of desert sand glow with colour, twirling and turning in their own dance across this carved and eroded land, reminding us of that 'presence' in the landscape, and our enduring connection with it.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious - Albert Einstein

 

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