ARTIST STATEMENT:

Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia. We arrange our lives and memories in an assortment of parcels of varying size. But not everyone thinks of time in this manner. The indigenous view of time is multi-dimensional; events are measured according to their importance, like a series of concentric circles emanating from an individual.

 When you think of time in this way, separating past from present takes on a very different complexion and the concept of an archive bursts out of its restrictive traditional definition. It is no longer a resource consulted occasionally but instead an integral part of today’s experience; a collection of images and information whose significance is as much in the here and now as it was when its elements were created.  It is this ability to bridge the archive and the contemporary that makes the Lure of the Arcane so powerful.

 Ancient objects are the cornerstone of practiced rites and they conjure up images of the exotic, the spiritual and the fabulous in the Western imagination. Their use in ceremony permits spirits and ancestors to be contacted and made active in this world. History stemming from European discovery to Christianity have disrupted the ebb and flow of cultural knowledge. This exhibition will interrogate artistic and creative methodologies and processes, culminating in the creation of visual resources that rebuilt, re-imagine, and reignite cultural expression.

Lure of the Arcane will blur the boundary between historical artefacts and contemporary artworks. Imagery, ideas and techniques - both inherited and rediscovered in archival material, are meshed with new artistic practices, materials and symbols to challenge a linear view of cultural history and capture what the late anthropologist Bill Stanner described as ‘everywhen’.