Variety is the spice of life

My day could not be more varied if I tried. A pre Xmas shared haul from the Beehives yielded 12 kilos. I was the photographer. The Beekeeper did all the really hard work on quite a warm day in his bee suit. Of course it is the bees who are the real heroes – they have plenty of honey left for them to enjoy. 

Then onto the new exhibition at QAGOMA – the Gallery of Modern Art with the title of AIR. 

Broken into a number of related subjects, Atmosphere, Shared, Burn, Invisible and Change. Artists from around the world brought their works on the subject of air, how we share it, how we fear it, how it changes for different social groups. “When artists address global issues confronting us today they energise us to change the world by changing the way we look at it”.
The works were monumental and tiny, mesmerising and magical and I was able to lose myself in that for a good few hours. The beautiful trees on the way to the Gallery. 

Mona Hatoum’s Hot Spot III 2009  her sphere of the earth has the perimeters of all continents burning dangerously red – its not just about the war zones, none of us are too far from hot spots anymore. 

Carlos Amorales Black Cloud focuses on our own relationships and our connection with nature. Something that feels terribly out of balance. This work was conceived after the death of his grandmother but also refers to the perilous migration of monarch butterflies between north America and Mexico. Populations are collapsing, black is the colour of mourning and also decay. 

Tomas Saracenos spectacular spheres. 15 Mirrored spheres create a space for rest and reflection. Where air becomes breath. They are part transparent and part reflective. Here I am reflected in the biggest. 

My favourite of all – seen previously in the gallery was Jonathan Jones monumental work Giran – the winds from 2018 of change and apprehension made with the help of so many volunteers and replete with the Voice of Dr Uncle Stan Grant, the smell of eucalyptus and the murmurations of Birds. 
Here is a detail of the pieces. Made with feathers collected from all over Australia. Bagaay – emu eggshell spoon, bindu ganay, a freshwater mussel scraper, waybarra, a weaving start, bingal a bone awl, a dhola ny a wooden spear and galigal a stone knife. 

And as if this was not enough, an afternoon lecture on Machiavelli’s The Prince. Polyglot Arthur Cominos recited it in Italian and then gave us the Greek translation as written by Nikos Kazantzakis. He ended his talk with a a Chinese fable of the Fox and Cockerel spoken in Mandarin – well that was different – and it all turned on the understanding of the term hypochrite which in Greek means to undertake a role. 

So with a delicate crescent moon lying down in the sky, I shall leave you with this quote from Kazantzakis – not part of todays lecture, but one which lends itself to the art work. 

“Since we cannot change reality let us change the eyes which see reality”. 

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