Boom Gallery serves up three solo exhibitions arriving next week

Home, Where The Hearth Is explores themes of home, family, renting and living on an island off another island. As luck would have it, I grew up in a loving family on Australia’s east coast. Now my siblings and I are scattered around the place while Mum and Dad hold down the fort in the family home.

The home and the hearth live inside of me. A dwelling in a body and a body in a dwelling. A feeling that lives inside like memories of places and people that I gently stoke to keep alive. A feeling that I take wherever I go.

The hearth represents warmth and takes a central position in the home, like the heart in the body. The hearth represents an altar too. An overlap of spiritual and domestic realms. Houses turn to homes and back as I move again and again. Packing away my books, collected shells, photographs, artworks, things that I have made and things that have made me.

Vessels echo shells perfectly, formed by the shellfish that once inhabited them; glazed surfaces evoke a sense of vastness and depth, while surface patterns and colour reference the energy and movement of a subaqueous world. Other forms are suggestive of classical pottery shapes—perhaps an ancient vessel, pulled from the sea? Viewed together, the various objects that make up Oceanic Feeling recall a collection of ocean mementos, such as the treasured fragments of shells, stones and seaglass pocketed on beach walks. They speak also to the vastness and mystery of the ocean.

This exhibition borrows its title from French writer and mystic Romain Rolland’s phrase “oceanic feeling”, which describes a ‘sensation of eternity,’ ‘a feeling of being one with the external world as a whole,’ and has come to refer to the feeling of limitlessness and wonder when one experiences the ocean. These vessels are an expression of my connection to the ocean, and in particular Queenscliff beach, where my parents live. Other bodies of water also informed this collection of works, such as the Tasman sea and the fresh water creeks of inland Victoria. Some works were made whilst I was undertaking an artist residency in the Peninsula of South Arm in Tasmania, and include stones, shell fragments and moulded casts from collected shells from the surrounding landscape and waterways. Ochre rocks and some of the stone inclusions have been collected from the dry creek bed near my home and studio in Central Victoria. The close inspection, collection, processing and subsequent transforming of these materials gives me a deeper sense of the natural world and reflects my profound respect for it.

This thinking, collecting and making was all done on Dja Dja Wurrung, Wadawurrung and Lutruwita lands and the traditional knowledge and continued practices of First Nations peoples was at the forefront of my mind.  For this ancient knowledge and their continued care, as well as my use of this land and its waterways, I give my deep respect, acknowledgement and gratitude.