Dare to Surrender
Roger Kemp Flight in Space (1960c -1965) on exhibition at the NGV, Melbourne.
Roger Kemp uses motifs of the square and the circle to represent the dynamic and the stable, to unify elements into balance. I think of his work today as the world as we know it, spins crazily out of balance.
How do we individually bring order and balance into our lives? One way is to try and control situations. Tidy the house, declutter, sort, do the washing. Yes I have done all of those things today.
The other way is to surrender, to stop trying to control things, especially given the escalating events of the past two weeks. One by one all the ordered plans, the workshops and travel I had planned have been cancelled and I have been forced to surrender.
While I welcome this opportunity to stop, I am also aware it is hard. It is scary, it means life can take a nose dive really quickly and all you can learn to do is to be resilient, to adapt, to surrender to the times.
This past month I have been running my signature online course Dare to Create. The last Inspiring Artist Interview I had was with Northern Rivers artist, Ellie Beck. Ellie is a textile artist who has published a book about makers and making. When I interviewed her it was almost like a prescient. She talked about slow living, slow creating, giving yourself permission to stop, to breathe and remember what is important in life.
I think of this in relation to Roger Kemp’s exhibition which filled several rooms in the NGV Melbourne. His later works looked like stained glass windows and were hung in a darkened room, illuminated as if from a light within. Like pieces of coloured glass, all of the elements were bound together in crazy geometric structures.
To stand in that darkened gallery space was to surrender to the chaos, to be still long enough so that eventually the fragments of chaotic colour come into focus and an order emerges. I take heart from this as we enter a time of quarantine and instability. To stay calm, to remember to breathe, to prioritise the things that matter. It takes courage to dare to surrender.
The darkened exhibition space showing part of a wall hung with Roger Kemp’s luminous paintings.
