ARTIST Madeline Clare may speak the same lingo as the locals but she still feels that overwhelming sense of displacement.
The UK painter moved to Perth in 1996 and says despite Australia being a cultural melting pot there is an expectation if you speak the “language” it should be a “happy place”.
“Well, I guess we are all trying either to get out of the pot or wait for it to get hotter,” she told the Herald. “Where home is? That is debatable. Despite the grounding presence of children and good friends in this hot land, there is another place far away and yet when I return there it feels strangely familiar and unreal.
“Is that my home or this one? Neither. Home is right here, within where I go frequently and eagerly to retrieve that sense of belonging to me.”
The Fremantle local says the crushing sense of segregation from family and friends back in Blighty, and a subsequent marriage breakdown, saw her plunge into depression.
After not painting for a number of years she decided to dust off the easel and pick up the paint brushes to draw upon themes of isolation and fragmentation.
“Isolation from the depression through trauma, displacement, disease and alone with three children with natural expectations of a mother,” she says.
“Fragmentation from the roles of ex-wife, artist, cleaner (not a very good one), mother of three different souls, uni student, daughter, friend, yoga teacher, lover, chef, counsellor—divided into many parts.”
Clare found that through her body of work she started to explore and play on the duality of opposites: chaos and order, sensual and clinical, sadness and joy.
She also found through painting an ability to “escape the delusions of mental dispersal”.
“At one end of the swinging pendulum of dualities, depression sits with its opposite of laughter and joy waiting at the other end,” she says.
“I love this sense of duality in the form of the egg. An egg rests with difficulty, it keeps moving in anticipation of change: Teetering, waiting, anticipating fall or breaking to reveal the potential of new life. Fascinating egg. And woman has so many of these potentials.”
Still humour
Clare’s first solo show Will You, Won’t You? Will You, Won’t You? Will You Join the Dance, runs at Kidogo Arthouse at Bathers Beach from November 29 to December 7.
She says despite the themes there is still a lot of humour in her paintings.
“A humour exists in the lightness of colour, the dance of the brush, the smile of the painter, the humour in the positioning of objects in a space (eggs).”
And in the end, like the title—a quote from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—Clare says we all at some stage find ourselves staring down the rabbit hole.
“Alice fell into a hole, I fell into a bottle? Fairy tales are metaphors for real living and I enjoy analysing the authors’ mental clarity, which is the result of so many years of having children. Will you…described that swinging pendulum between living and dying, pain and pleasure, ecstasy and darkness. Will you…join me in the dance? Dance of life? To embrace the living with a will for survival.”
by BRENDAN FOSTER