By Amelia Hughes
When we saw the beautiful artwork Amelia created for her assessment, we had to find out more. Please find below Amelia’s Artist Statement about her wonderful creation.
Amelia writes:
For my term one Visual Art assessment task I created a Surrealist Sculpture, The Gift of Creation, based on the surrealism movement we learnt about in Visual Art class and two surrealist artworks I analysed, untitled (giran) by Jonathan Jones and Lamp by Merric Boyd.
Surrealism first began after WWI as a form of rebelling or rejecting the rational and structured way of thinking and viewing the world, to allow artists and their viewers to escape into a dream-like imaginative world of the strange and unusual.
When exploring my own Surrealist concepts or themes in my imagination and dreams (reflecting on my dream world), I found many aspects of my life illustrated. I did not dream of distorted realities with grotesque elements, I dreamt of parts of my life. I used many of these concepts (with some I recorded in my Art Journal) to imagine an artwork that depicted my life with surrealist elements to demonstrate life’s uniqueness. Important parts of my life include my Family, my GCC Family, my Faith, Connection to my Aboriginal Culture and Country, my love for my bushland home and life’s journey so far.
When creating my Surrealist Sculpture, I began with a piece of wood which I cleaned and sanded. I then began adding various found objects to this tree-like shape. I used the flower-like parts of an old light, which I painted and manipulated into a flower and a quandong fruit, which I added to my sculpture, levitated on pieces of wire (the idea of suspension from Jonathan Jones’s installation untitled (giran)).
I weaved a figure, who now sits along the base of the tree, resting one hand on a snake coiling up the tree, and the other hand along a trail of footprints which travel up one of the branches. This branch is naturally shaped like a hand, which I call the hand of God, as it supports these small footprints which lead to a meeting place resting in the hand’s palm.
This meeting place is shaped like a small platform based high in the tree, though it represents my Aboriginal ancestors’ Bora rings, where people met as part of our Lore, the basis of our culture connected to God’s hand. On two of the fingertips, copper wire circles out and up into the sky, symbolising the power of prayer. Also sitting on a fingertip is an eagle, though quite a surreal one. This eagle is made from a small branch with two gum nuts as eyes and ten colourful feathers. These bright colours in the feathers present a surreal perspective of colour and life.
As this eagle looks out at the world and watches over humanity, this represents the eagle’s divine symbolism in Christianity and in First Nations Culture. Around the trunk of the tree curls a snake looking towards a web, a weaving piece inside a circle of yini (lawyer cane), which connects all the threads of life together in a beautiful form. Supporting this tree of life is a rock base full of ancient fossils (from my creek at home) and pieces of shell and coral from the beach which symbolises the growth (into coral and shells for living organisms) from the most ancient of materials (rock and stone) and beliefs, that even now, our past supports our future. Reminding me of “…upon this rock I will build my church…” Matthew 16:18.
Through all these examples of various perspectives of different elements in my sculpture, I have created a surreal experience of my life, dreams and imagination.
As I created my artwork, I did not make a plan of what to do and how to do it. That is not how surrealism works, and I have found that I can not tell my dreams and beliefs what to do; I just listen to how they guide me. Though one thing that was a bit unexpected was the glue I used to add different objects together ended up not supporting, so I had to switch to a different kind of glue. In a way, this scenario reminded me of life, the small things that happen, which you must adapt to. I love how my artwork, my dream, has unfolded before me and how adding a variety of objects together, and manipulating them in a surrealist way has created a truly unique artwork.
I love how looking at my artwork makes me feel, adding little objects here and there to create a diverse and surreal experience. As you look at my sculpture from different angles, you can get different perspectives of life, conveying how life appears different depending on how you look at it. I believe when the audience views my work, they will see its strangeness and uniqueness, though they will also see the complexity life and dreams bring to an otherwise ordered existence in society. This artwork may provoke its viewers to see life differently and with a more open mind than previously.
I enjoyed the process of mind-mapping my ideas and creating my sculpture, and I am curious how the audience may be challenged to view things a little differently. Surrealism is strange, unique, creative and an incredible artistic exploration of one’s life and dreamworld, and I have certainly grown to appreciate the joy that comes with being a little surreal every now and again.