The new terracottas reference prehistory forms and decoration.
These works have taken a previous iteration of a similar aesthetic on a Mount Warning theme, transposed to the Blue Mountains and evolving the work to a more directly expressive form in the making, to push at the limits around balance and tension. The more direct approach to decoration is simpatico to the terracotta surface, providing a natural integrity.
Drawing on a range of influences, including memories of living in Paris as a young artist, and to the Louvre and Musée d'Orsay, viewing the African commercial galleries with beaded and woven textiles, and more recently a subscription to the international magazine HALI (on textiles).
The new works are also a return to the sensuality of walking. To the sense of the enormity of views, to have created a framework to depict them in patterning on terracotta (literally, painting on baked dirt), that captures the sense of a journey and its return.
(text from conversations with Linden Hyatt.)
