Journeys into unfamiliar territory
In Dreams, Carl Jung makes reference to a 'shapeless life-mass' which is perhaps, in the case of an artist, the sum of experience: both sensory and psychic. This is reminiscent of the idea of alchemical chaos, and he comments on the need for creative change in order to transform the mass. He also makes reference to animal impulses as part of the process of creative change:
During this process one is "bitten" by animals; in other words, we have to expose ourselves to the animal impulses of the unconscious without identifying them and without "running away ... 1
In Journeys into unfamiliar territory, both the artist and the viewer of this work are bitten by the animal. The tension resulting from Anne Lord's encounter with the animal is put to work in the paintings, prints and drawings she has produced particularly since 1985. The animal works in the visual sense as part of her discourse and the power of the images in the paintings and prints is very much reliant on the artist's ability to avoid identifying unconscious impulses, a capacity that is evidenced by Anne's reticence in discussing the content of her work.
The exhibition includes large oil paintings, suites of woodblock prints, watercolours, monotypes and drawings. As with almost all of her earlier work, the landscape of western Queensland features as raw material, the artist's familiarity with that landscape being an operative factor, and secondary to this is a sense of empathy with the natural forces that alternately shape and destroy the land. The everyday occurrence becomes an element of daydreams that are described and explored. The taciturn nature of the inhabitants of the west is