Artists WA – showcasing West Australian artists

Loss + Endings = Fish

In an Article for The New Yorker in July 2005 [Death of a fish], Adam Gopnik wrote that “the real proof of consciousness is the pain of loss”. Young children are often given fish as pets, trial and error to teach them about life and death and responsibility, so that perhaps as they grow older the passing of the family dog will be understood at a greater level a precursor to the deity of dying and rising or the life-death-rebirth. Fish for me are a very strong symbol of life’s fragility, often experienced through a child’s eyes for the first of many times to come.

For me, tradition has dictated that icons are assigned meanings, some of which have been reappropriated and reassigned from symbols of peace to symbols of war, marks of shame have been rebornas marks of respect, as I started to deconstruct my work, my compositions, I began to look at the symbols that I’ve used repeatedly, to accentuate meaning to a characters action, to take something further from loneliness or isolation to sadness and melancholy or a sense of loss. With symbols fire can equateto life, but does that mean a burnt match has been just used, or has it’s short life passed and it is in our sense no longer with us.

My examination and illustration of the human condition is something that I’ve done for a long time, along with the assignment of meaning to colours that I’ve used for many years. Grey=concrete, black=dirt, white=the attempt to remove dirt and silver=dreams. In this body of work I’ve looked at the introduction of “spot” colours to draw attention todifference, to denote changes or symbolise what
could be. The last two canvases I painted for my first solo exhibition I didn’t start with a sketch or an idea, I just commenced painting, the resultant works were “untitled”. A lot of the subject matter in that exhibition was auto-biographical, and needed to be left behind, those last two pieces were about the future, in order to move forward you have to let the past go, but this process is never ending, it is for me the epitome of the human endeavour and one of the reasons that celebrates beauty masked by the layers of life.

Stormie Mills

For more information and images: LK GALLERIES