Fiorella Glover, Marijke Thysse, Megan Wilson
The idea that the experience of 'home' becomes more explicable when countered with an idea of its lack was proffered by the exhibition, Neck of the Woods. The artists, Fiorella Glover, Marijke Thysse and Megan Wilson, sought to interrogate the notion of home from their different cultural perspectives through text, collage, sculpture and works on paper. The exhibition was coloured by the artists' experience of migration, travel and dislocation. The notion of 'home' emerged through the question of feeling at home, not only in this place, this country, but also in language and in one's body. Given the artists' project of exploring their origins, there emerged a sense of longing: not just longing for another place, but also longing for a resolution of the problematic sense of homelessness, unrootedness and inbetweenness. Herein the immigrant was presupposed as inherently duplicitous whereby transit rendered him or her not rooted to any place, but inextricably linked to a place of origin and to the past.
Glover migrated to Australia as a child, Thysse as an adult with her young family and Wilson is Brisbane-born. However, Wilson's series of mixed media images of letter boxes in western Queensland-invariably constructed of found objects such as tin drums and milk urns—were developed as she was travelling through the region. The question of how 'at home' does the city dweller feel in this environment remains unanswered. Her work presented 'home' as the address, the site where lines of communication end. These images of quirky objects were perhaps celebratory of 'good old country ingenuity' and sat uncomfortably with the knowledge of Australia's colonial past. Perhaps unintentionally, the images, coupled with extracts from Australian poetry such as "Clancy of