Stories as Art
Nicole Kemp. Covid Quilt - Pictured supplied by the artist.
What stories do you tell yourself about yourself?
Do you tell good ones or bad ones? Emotions are the energetic glue that makes your stories stick and get stored deep within body’s circuitry archive.
Everyone has a story to tell. You might not remember where it comes from, but somewhere deep inside you remember a feeling. Like the freedom of riding a bike down a hill or of swinging on a swing – my story is connected with being hit by a swing in the playground and getting a black eye.
How do you express your stories, and how do you document your daily life, the personal and social times in which you live? If you look at the great writers and artists, their work was a product of the times.
Picasso’s Guernica was bearing witness to the bombing of the small Basque town in Spain which heralded the blitzkrieg bombings in World War II. Dickens chronicled life in Victorian England, Jacques Louis David portrayed the French revolution and the rise of Napolean.
Today we live in a time of global upheaval, with a world in climate crisis and a pandemic killing millions. Artists have responded in their own ways to these times, telling stories of time in lock-down, of catastrophic bush fires and a planet out of balance.
I was privileged to tune into a zoom presentation by Victorian artist Nicole Kemp who was talking about her Covid Quilt , a patchwork of squares documenting the pandemic which has now been acquired by Museums Victoria. It is truly an “I was here” artwork, documenting the incredible stories and images seen on TV and in the streets of Melbourne during 2020.
The pandemic has changed the way we now communicate and emphasised the importance of connecting virtually across borders and continents.
When I think of the last two years I think of these two things existing side by side. A global climate crisis and a world wide pandemic. Both indicate to me a world and a thinking out of balance.
I look at the way I installed these two pieces of artwork on a wall. Global Hotspots and Brynir, the fire dragon. Fires and Global Warming, my expression of what is both personal and global. I escaped the fires, my family survived a flood and l find myself making work about the climate crisis. These are my stories, but the more personal they are, the more global and political they become. I add my voice to amplify this important message.
Global Hotspots & Brynir the fire dragon.
