I recently painted a series of magpie geese for Bustard Town in Darwin - peculiar honking clowns dressed in very expensive looking black and white suits, whose arrival signals the beginning of the wet season.They mate in thruples! And I for one find their eccentric little setup very charming. Was well pleased to find the opportunity to paint them all blown up and shocking on the wall of one of my favourite music spaces in Darwin.
The older I get, the more I realise the places I care about painting the most are the ones that matter to community. Places where people gather, dance, connect, mobilise and occasionally lose the plot. Been thinking lots about folk art lately too, and recognising some of my own tastes and instincts within it. Art that’s woven into everyday life rather than separated from it - symbolic, practical, a little rough around the edges, and shaped by local mythology.
So much of modern Western and big city life revolves around mobility, ambition, speed, endless appetite and individual success, and lately I’ve found myself becoming increasingly interested in rootedness, ritual, connection to place and the beauty of ordinary things. Devotion to the ordinary. Stripping away the noise a bit. Starting to suspect these are some of the core ingredients that actually make a life feel rich… and starting to accept the fact that I am in fact a country girl.
Long live strange birds and community halls!
