Ahead of her group show with Greg Wood and Joel Sorensen, we sat down with Australian artist Zoe Amor to discuss her new body of work for 'Between the Pages of the Earth and Sky'.
OTOMYS: How do you understand your work in relation to the earth and the sky?
Zoe Amor: Art allows one to travel through time and space, where the past exists in the present and the full compliment of human emotions are experienced.
When I was painting and drawing massive Antarctic glaciers and icebergs, ancient trees, mountain ranges, deserts, vast skies, cloud formations and the architecture of dreams – I came across a beautiful book about Persia with photographs by Roloff Beny and a collection of poems which inspired the title for this group exhibition.
Words by the 12th C Persian poet Mir Mo cezzi :
“Inscribed upon the pages of the earth and sky
The line: ‘ Therefore take heed you who have eyes.”
In considering how we as individuals connect and work between the pages of the earth and sky we are also relating to how our subject matter and the materials we use connect to the elements of creation – water, earth, air, fire, wood, ether and how these, in turn, relate to our bodies and our life.
In ancient cultures, the branches of the Mother Tree held these elements and was the source of all life; knowledge, succour and destiny.
OTOMYS: You live and work in the Castlemaine region of Victoria. How does your relationship to this beautiful part of the world inform your artistic practice?
Zoe Amor: To feel the changing of the seasons on your skin, see the sky fill with dark clouds rimmed by the dying light of the sun, observe moonlight through trees and life unfolding in the blackness of soil – these experiences inform my consciousness adding depth and reality to a visual language that seeks to make space for the mystery of nature and our co-existence with the non-human.
OTOMYS: There is a strong thread in each of your works between the natural environment, memory and consciousness. What is it that draws you to examine nature in relation to one's psyche?
Zoe Amor: We often seem to be visited by feelings of landscape that are not necessarily of our birth origin – the hiraeth (or nostalgia) for those places we would return to if we could. It’s so rare for us to be truly in the wilds of nature surrounded as we are by the built environment and the anthropocentric world view, but there is a symbiotic, matrixial view that revolves not around the ego but around the planet – it’s biosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere – this is where my mind’s eye returns to, seeing the interconnectedness of the micro and macro within the matrix of life.
The associations and memories we carry with us from the many lives we lead in one can be felt as subtle movements into stillness or as violent collisions depending on how we feel in that moment. Psyche is a true symbol of the totality of one’s nature – my thoughts, feelings, memories, attitudes, hopes, fears and affections – the whole personality is encompassed and given life through this feminine principle and that is where the art, heart and hearth is.
OTOMYS: Can you speak to your selected medium as your chosen artistic expression. What is it that draws you to this medium, and through this medium what have you discovered about yourself?
Zoe Amor: Drawings are immediate observations of what you think, dream, feel or know of your subject. When the tool of the medium becomes an extension of your hand, heart and mind your sensibilities and ideas in that moment flow into the work, which can be mysterious, confronting or enlightening all in the same process.
Mark making, notations, rhythmic forms and representations are part of the pictorial space which sculpture occupies in other dimensions. There is full body involvement in the process; wax, wire, wood, clay or plaster is modelled, carved, chiselled, brushed, inscribed and in the case of lost wax casting in bronze - filed, chased, sand blasted, finished and patinated. By physically moving with the process the artwork can exist in it’s own right, liberated from circumscribing systems that can be restrictive.
Working across mediums over a long period of time has brought me home across the dark waters of the Negredo to an elliptical, non - linear view of art and time. The past exists within the present, the phallus alongside the matrix which can be endlessly nourished and recreated. Art is that which is yet to come.
