LEAF
AFTER LEAF
Last year I had the renewed joy and pleasure walking through forests under a canopy of trees, along foot tracks around and over rocks. This is called shinrin-yoku in Japanese, forest bathing, a physiological and psychological exercise for wellbeing. Unlike monoculture forests in other countries, Australian forests have a diversity with multispecies of trees, depending on the soil and aspect. The trees are identified often by the leaves on the path.
I was walking the Great North Walk, from Sydney towards Newcastle, and was aware that others had walked these paths before for generations. My prints are inspired by the Forest Portrait drawings of Marion Mahony Griffin from 1919; and by a silk screen poster of Marie McMahon, You are On Aboriginal Land 1984.
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a parenthesis of eight, now seven, spaces
HOLD EVERYTHING DEAR, NOW MORE THAN EVER
Ro Murray, Michelle Belgiorno, Mandy Burgess, Deborah Burdett, Renuka Fernando, Jo Meisner, Michelle Connolly, Tilly Lees
Two years ago, back when the world was different, eight artists grouped together to exhibit under a call to hold everything dear. A call that could be anything from an urgent cry out loud - strident and politic - to quieter, mutterings to self. Only it had to be a call for human qualities of survival and resistance against inequity and despair. Since that time however, the eight have sadly and unexpectedly lost one of their group, and now come together once more without her, to exhibit artworks made against that intervening, overwhelming, desperate event of a global pandemic. After grief and isolation, the call is all the more poignant, to hold everything dear, as they say, now more than ever. [Read more of Lisa Pang’s essay]