“What Beebe saw on that trip … was a glowing world of creatures so astonishing that for decades many doubted his
veracity. The clear sea stretched endlessly, and was so full of luminescence that it sparkled like the night sky. … great
shadows and shifting patches of light hovered just out of view, leading him to postulate the existence of giants in the
Bermudan depths. And below the bathysphere? There, said Beebe, lay a world that “looked like the black pit-mouth of hell
itself.” 1
Deep sea dystopia or luminous wonderland? The deeper into the unknown, the more alien and bizarre – like dreams of a fleeting elsewhere. Liquid Abyss is an exploration of imagining oceanic life-forms of the hadal zone. The ethereal and comical coalesce with the terrifying unknown and banal reality; a perpetual rain of detritus, human and otherwise.
There is beauty in strange mutations and regeneration of primal life-forms, and horror in the disintegration of a
fragile biosphere. The sight of the sea can evoke in our subconscious something of our primal beginning. The ocean
depths seem connected in intimate and immediate ways to ourselves and it believed that we evolved from the sea.
Yet we are wary intruders– slowly destroying the elements that gave birth to us.
With a practice that focuses on drawing, abstract video and immersive installation with projection. Simple drawing
combined with digital processes serves to push the possibilities of transition and the creation of abstract animated
‘stories’ that subtly convey issues and themes through coded symbols, pattern and sound. Conscious reflection and
unconscious drives that form the basis of drawing become expansive and immersive through projection.
1 Tim Flannery, “Where Wonders Await Us”, The New York Review of Books, December 2007,
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2007/12/20/where-wonders-await-us/
Exhibition Details:
Opening Friday August 10th, 6-9pm
Exhibition runs August 8- 25th
Five Walls (Gallery 1)
suite 3, level 1 / 119 Hopkins St Footscray
open wed-sat 12-5pm