work / LOVE LETTERS - SPRING1883 2016

Love Letters

Tolarno Galleries at SPRING 1883

August 17th - 21st

The Windsor, Melbourne

'love letter, love letter, go get her, go get her...love letter, love letter, go tell her, go tell her *

Love Letters is an intimate project comprising of nine small paintings and a hand drawn multiple in five parts. The project has been specially conceived for Spring1883 at the Windsor Hotel. The works relate to a series of letters and Aerograms sent to me in the mid 1980s by my partner Dana – love letters that I recently rediscovered, packed carefully away in a small box. These beautiful remnants are private portals to the past and are loaded with nostalgic references to an earlier time in our lives that seemed governed by simple desires and real world, emotional experiences that we were so eager to share with each other. The earliest of these letters was posted over 30 years ago when we were both in our early twenties.

The works in this project are the exact scale of the original letters sent by Dana, from Australia, New Zealand and Japan as I travelled through Asia the Middle East and Europe and later through Central and South America. No text, instead, the works focus on the abstracted blue and red angled patterns around the edge of the envelopes. A reference to the now (mostly) obsolete, though immediately recognizable, formal vernacular of airmailed letters and Aerograms. These simple blue and red forms are enough to trigger, for the viewer, the memories associated with the anticipation and excitement of sending or receiving a letter from a loved one, especially in a time pre-internet, when connections, while travelling or living abroad, were intermittent and often unreliable and telephoning was usually out of the question.

Each work will be placed on the antique writing desk in the Prince Albert Suite at The Windsor Hotel.This spectacular object, which in itself is so evocative of a romantic, bygone era, will be used as a platform, or carrier of the Love Letter narrative.

Both the writing desk and works will operate together, acting as emotional triggers for the viewer, prompting their own personal experiences. Possibly evoking memories of earlier days, of romance and longing, of being in love and being separated from home and loved ones - the relentless homesickness, and those endless hours spent writing, recording events and desires…and waiting for a reply.

* Love Letter - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. 2001