Shape Shifting

Braemar Gallery 2023

The term shape shifting is used in fiction and mythology for the process of a person or creature changing its form. Through papier mache sculpture, mixed media and scrolls I explore shape shifting as a metaphor for physical and psychological change experienced through life cycle stages and illness.
The exhibition brings different threads of life, interests and imagination together including medical history, archaeology, and botany.
Many of the works have been informed by years of working at the National Herbarium of NSW, where thousands of botanical specimens passed through my hands. The aesthetic of the specimen sheet has been a big influence but the plants featured are imagined, “Frankenstein” combinations of plants and humans.
Bone scan images of my skeleton from the 1980s are included as collage in all of the works. I find the aesthetics of medical imaging mesmerising and these ones hold a personal significance. Rather than a symbol of death the skeletons and bones allude to temporary states of illness, survivorship, and the constant changes our bodies go through.
To quote Susan Sontag: Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.
The skeletons can also be read as generic images of human remains which symbolises the many existential threats currently facing humanity on a broad scale. Archaeological discoveries of lost civilizations and their artefacts have inspired the visual style of the sculptures. Another manifestation of shape shifting is in the creation of art, where ideas and emotions can be extracted from the inner world and given a physical form in the external world.