women travellers

2019: Resilience in the natural world – Resilient Women Traveller Series

The following works will feature in an upcoming joint show at Alternating Current (26 April to 18 May 2019). The show is titled Resilience in the natural world. Melody Spangaro and I have approached the theme of resilience from two different perspectives and dimensions (temporal and geographic), unified by the central theme of exploration of the natural world. I explore the resilience displayed by female travellers such as Isabella Bird, Mildred Cable and others in Central Asia between 1890 and 1930. My works consist of diptychs of the traveller and the landscape in which she travelled. The use of magenta references the colour coding of the Penguin travel series, in recognition of their travel writing. Closer to Melbourne and current time, Melody Spangaro has explored the visual representation of personal experiences and memories of insignificant natural environments. Through exploration of the treatment of abandoned objects, Melody highlights our degradation of the natural landscape, a landscape once as pristine as that explored by the travellers in my works.