The Island Dweller: Twilight journey in the global present
New work: Whitespace, 12 Crummer Road, Ponsonby Auckland, 9 September 2007
I don't know whether it has been too much stimulation and change, but I've struggled more than a little since I came to over to this part of the world in terms of finding meaning in what I do. The clamour of voices is just deafening out here beyond Aotearoa. As a result, every colour has had a habit of turning itself to mud, every road has appeared empty on the canvas and, the most impeding of all, every thought has been negated or annihilated in some way.
So, in light of this, I have wondered what my practice really is... to press on speeding through a world so over stimulated, it's become as numb as its inhabitants?
The ceaseless surge of land development has overwhelmed me since I arrived in Spain and I doubt this is geographically or culturally unique. As a result, I had decided to focus my thoughts on a journey in no-man's land; with its discarded supermarket trolleys, building materials, and placards advertising pending development, where people are caught in the "independent republic" (to take the ironic IKEA marketing phrase) of selling, buying, needing and believing. But it got too damn depressing to be honest.
"The Island Dweller" has instead become a more personal tracing of an existence in two worlds; a quiet twilight journey in a shadowy and foreign present through a foreign landscape of little familiarity that I can weave into. I am here alone, on a new strange sort of island questioning my own culture, whether it begins and ends on the shores of Aotearoa, or whether it goes with me as I construct a new sense of place, of meaning and even safety in an ever increasing, giant riddle of existing - the global present.
Emma Pratt May 2007
Image: Island Dweller I, oil on gabardine, 1160 x 840mm