Belonging: Loss and Memory  Artist Statement

Throughout my life, I have experienced the constant upheaval of moving homes, approximately 22 times. Each relocation involved packing up our belongings and embarking on a journey to create a new home, hauling our possessions along with us. This recurring process made me contemplate the concept of belonging and its intricate relationship with our homes. I began to question the significance of the objects we carry with us and the mundane objects that bear witness to our daily lives and cherished memories. Do we truly need these possessions to remember the losses we have endured?

 In my exploration of belonging, I used various media that had a previous purpose. For instance, I utilised reclaimed wooden parquetry flooring from the 2019 floods, repurposed keys, and anodised aluminium. By incorporating these materials into my work, I sought to imbue them with new meaning.

 To delve deeper, I embarked on a research journey to relocate all Twenty-two of my previous homes. Some of them had long been forgotten, others had been destroyed by fire, and some had been replaced entirely, but all of them held distant recollections of our time spent there. The series titled Journey, guides viewers along this path using my past street names. I believe that fragments of myself remain in these places, just as they have left something in me.

 The use of keys in my artwork draws on a narrative from Umbrella Studio’s moves following the 2019 Townville floods. Keys hold immense power; without one, a person could find themselves homeless. Belonging aims to represent many of those displaced people.