I’m really glad to be able to accompany you on your journey through “A Miracle Constantly Repeated.” I am looking forward to talking about what I was thinking when I imagined this show and the work in it.
If you asked me to sum up my practice in one word, that word would be “relationships”. You will see relationships everywhere in my work, between people and animals, and things and the world, between the artificial and the natural.
I started thinking about this exhibition in early 2020. First there were the bushfires, and then there was COVID. I mean, it was scary.
But I didn’t want to just make work that reproduced that fear. Because I know how I react when I’m confronted by the scariness: I just freeze. I don’t want to freeze people. I would like there to be room for action, and for hope.
So, I wanted to make a show that acknowledges the challenges we face, but also celebrates resilience: our resilience as people, but also nature’s resilience.
I wanted to think about life itself, and marvel at the sheer unstoppable vitality of the living world around us.
I was also thinking about how we might find a new way to imagine the relationship between people and nature. How do we arrive at a new understanding of nature that is progressive and positive for all the species on earth, including humans but not just for humans?
Care and connection are at the heart of the exhibition. While there is often strangeness I hope that you will leave the exhibition with a sense of the possibility for connection. I wanted to try to make a space for everyone.
As an artist I begin with the basic assumption that all life, all bodies, all beings are beautiful.
‘A Miracle Constantly Repeated’ is a place where the real and the imagined collide, where they are allowed to merge and connect rather than separate. We are going to see inconceivable objects in actual spaces, and hopefully they’ll make sense together.