Sydney Contemporary 2025
This new series of painting continues the lines of interrogation explored in my 2024 series Witness, where I examined how we transpose simplified archetypal myths onto complex historical and personal narratives to claim better understandings of and contextualise our relationships to these realities. In that series I used two companion animals; a horse and cat, as archetypes that have traditionally been used in folktale storytelling as metaphors or shorthand for different aspects human behaviour, and especially how we relate to each other. This limited series for Sydney Contemporary acts as an epilogue for Witness, where the cat has continued its journey and now seeks guidance from a seal.
Where I am living in Thailand, cats occupy a slightly different role in culture, and while being kept as beloved pets, they often roam widely and have run of all the back streets and communal alleys. While they have a relative freedom of movement compared to most that I have seen in Australia (and especially with dogs), I still found it interesting that by their very breeding and behaviour it is evident to me that their current existence is adapted and predicated on their proximity and relationship to people and the built environment. In thinking on this I considered what freedom means broadly when it exists in predetermined structures, and then I thought about places where there are less actual man-made structures, and I thought of the ocean. Continuing this meandering train of thought I was pleasantly surprised to discover the direct English translation of แมวน้ำ, the Thai word for ‘seal’, is ‘water-cat’.
A component of my 2015 photographic series Coming to terms featured myself in a monkey mask cradling and looking down at real-life monkey. For me it spoke to the ‘imagined’ being confronted and coming to terms with the ‘reality’. In similar circumstances in this new seal series, my ghostly cartoon cat is looking up at proud, sleek and wild seals. For me it speaks to a perception of freedom existing within a structure, coming to face to face with a freedom that knows no bounds or prescriptions. To emphasize this difference, the final work in the series features only a seal, surrounded by the text, ‘to be ungovernable’. Rather than a call to action like, ‘be ungovernable’, the phrase becomes a statement of longing and contemplation on what it would be to be truly free.