Imagination the pathway to narrative artwork

7 MIN READ

I can often recall what some might say is useless information (like cicadas and magician’s lyres) at the drop of a hat. Personally, I like to call it impractical, not useless. It’s certainly useful in my own way as I find myself creating connections between random bits and pieces both in my work and in my personal life.

I’ve come to understand (with the help of Nilofer Merchant), that I, like you and everyone else, have a unique place in this world. In fact, my onlyness, or how I add value to this world has a pathway based on my unique history, experiences, visions and hopes. From this spot, I’m able to offer my distinct perspective and ideas.

Simply put, onlyness is how we all add value to the world.

My pathway to telling stories on walls (or what I now call bespoke narrative artwork for those playing at home) starts on a hot summer day as a kid of the nineties when Mum’s patience with my younger siblings and I was wearing quite thin. She asked whether, instead of running around terrorising each other, we’d like to paint the walls of the outside dunny. We shrugged our shoulders nonchalantly and hunted down the paints and brushes.

To explain why this was not as unusual a request as it sounds, we lived on and farmed 4,000 acres. Amongst the wasp nests, holes in the rotten timber deck and stray cats sniffing for scraps, the original dunny was located outside on the veranda of our run-down, fibro home.

Armed with the paints and brushes, we headed out barefoot and painted our masterpieces as if it was our own personal art gallery. We didn’t know if we were using water- or oil-based paints, watercolours or acrylics, just that Mum was happy we were (finally) getting along.

Later on, much to our chagrin, our collective body of work was painted over with a fresh coat of white. I’ve since developed a sneaking suspicion we may have missed the brief!

Fast forward to high school art class, I spent more time mixing paints than producing work, and smudging coloured pencil shavings onto the pages of a visual art diary than formulating a supporting rationale. My art teacher was perceptive enough to give me the space I needed to explore, but I’m sure it was frustrating to review my abstract results without proper articulation. 

University in the naughties was a blur of learning how to articulate the loose connections I discovered in response to assignments, all in pursuit of a nominal grade for subjective work.

It was freelance work over the next ten years that proved to align my experiences as I worked on (amongst other things) large-format outputs like billboards and semi-trailer curtains and 3D fabrication. That spatial awareness I was unaware of, but utilised back in the nineties summer, was the perfect base for understanding how to translate ideas into one big picture (literally!). 

Another summer day decades later, there was a blur of numbers and machines, beeps of things, dates and weights, cream corridors and people in blue with names I can’t remember. All as I admitted my six-month-old baby girl to surgery.

The people in blue shuffled around wearing funny shoes. My husband looked like a cauliflower in his scrubs and we had a little laugh while nurses wrapped our daughter in warm white blankets while it was 44 degrees outside.

Each time we waited for those surgeries and subsequently post-surgery recoveries, follow-ups and specialist appointments, we were always surrounded by art. The colour in the paediatric ward waiting room, the landscapes in the corridor to surgery, the stars hanging on fishing lines from the ceiling. It was always there sitting silently, unobscured and sifting through our sub-conscious in intangible ways.

In 2015, upon pitching an expression of interest for being in the artist pool for the Murrumbidgee Local Health District hospital redevelopment projects, I quoted supporting information from, ‘Guide to Evidence-Based Art: A Position Paper for The Centre for Health Design’s Environmental Standards Council’.

So many of the findings from this paper ring so very true for me personally, with such vivid memories of the art from our time in the hospital still etched inside my mind. In what was such an emotional time, it was the colour, form and depth of the art within the environment which were the most memorable. Those which were easily recognisable and thus comforting in their familiarity. It’s as Florence Nightingale describes in, ‘Notes for Nursing’, the patients’ need for beauty and making the argument that the effect of beauty is not only on the mind, but on the body as well.

Following the success and being chosen, I’ve worked with many teams at the hospital to deliver site-specific artwork for a number of health care settings, like playrooms, gyms and emergency treatment rooms, right through to windows and entrances. 

This pathway to this onlyness, equips me with a narrative artwork style which, when presenting to steering committees at engagement sessions, I speak to without the need to read from a script or a series of annotations. The objective is for the artwork to add to the service quality of the health care setting, rather than merely serve as a backdrop. It’s important to me for my artwork to connect, in order to move, inspire, or motivate others to act.

It’s funny to think, when it all boils down, can be traced back simply to a hot summer’s day, barefoot and deeply engaged, with a paintbrush in hand and a smiling Mum watching silently from the wings.

P.S: For those wondering, my daughter is running around fit and well now, with her own stories to tell. And so the pathway continues!