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Resilience | Inheritance | Out SourcePolitical Papers

Pomegranate-Seeds-of-Same

(Pomegranate) Seeds of Same
2021+2023
acrylic, ink on canvas
30x24cm
photography ©Benjamin Deakin

Nature Nature, All Over Me
2021+2023
acrylic, ink, glitter on canvas
30x24cm
photography ©PYLam

Source Coaster
2021+2023
acrylic, ink on canvas
30x24cm
photography ©PYLam

 Tracing the Bones of the Red Palace
2021+2023
acrylic, ink on canvas
75x50cm
photography ©PYLam

Footsteps Over the Underbelly of Beck’s Volcano
2021+2023
acrylic on linen
30x30cm
photography ©PYLam

 

False Negative (Held Between Two Worlds) 
2021
acrylic on canvas
70x60cm
photography ©Benjamin Deakin

Overlooked Histology
2021+2023
acrylic on canvas
30x24cm
photography ©PYLam

Looked Overlooked
2021+2023
acrylic on canvas
30x24cm
photography ©PYLam

Kin and Bone and Tissue
2021
acrylic on canvas
120x90cm
photography ©Benjamin Deakin

 Fourth Heritage
2021
acrylic on canvas
150x120cm
photography ©Benjamin Deakin

Like Mother Like
2020
acrylic on canvas
30x30cm
photography ©Benjamin Deakin

Grounded
2020
acrylic on canvas
30x30cm
photography ©Benjamin Deakin

Left and Righteous
2020
acrylic on canvas
30x20cm
photography ©PYLam

INHERITANCE explores the nature and nurture of lineage, embodied landscape and epigenetic memory. It is shaped by ideas of and around my particularly complicated familial past in Australia. Strands of DNA are set against vines of entanglement, intense colouring snakes around umbilical cords, and storytelling folds in on distinctions between design and imagery. All the while, overlaid backgrounds conceal and reveal the layers of making. Surfaces are left bare or sanded back. Openings become portals to other places and patterning is held in the rhythm of its own detail.

The series started with this little painting, Left and Righteous. Contours are borrowed from a previous painting to shape the ground, so its beginning is partly a continuum. The arrows point directions from and towards. Left as in past and abandoned. Right as in correct and rightful. Ahead being a head, being the gable headdress of the 16th century English court: an identity imposed upon Catalina de Aragón who became Katharine Queen of England.

The patterning recalls camouflaging from an idealistic landscape of the aristocracy, uninterrupted by development. Where a design of war becomes the art of Warhol – supposedly connected with the all-encompassing tranquillity of Monet waterlilies – becomes a design of fashion.