Description
Title: “Koekoea in the Fig Tree”
- Size and media: acrylic on canvas 70 cm x 50 approx
- Body of Work: 2012: Irene Ferguson and Emma Pratt: Witness, Hastings City Art Gallery www.hastingscityartgallery.co.nz New Zealand, Whitespace Contemporary Art, Auckland, New Zealand
- Signed front
- Storage: Palmerston North, New Zealand
These paintings mark the beginning of my time spent in community spaces with my very young children, and the community garden called El Huerto del Rey Moro, The Garden of the Moorish King, Seville, Spain. I changed to acrylic being pregnant at the time I painted these.
I am going right back to the origins of current western cultural ideas of what landscape is and the memory placed into it and reflecting on my own acts as a landscape constructor and mark maker. I like to see how these ideas have shifted across time and space and how it can help me find a sense of sacred space in the global landscapes that cradle my consciousness.
“The wilderness, so named by us, needs a visitor, a memory, because, like any monument (and it is), it cannot remember itself. So that’s me, I am providing the memory, returning as I constantly do in my art making to frame landscapes of the wilderness/garden of my infancy, the Eden from which we were cast.” Pratt, E. L. “Food Wood Water Rock.”
Art All Magazine. Nov. 2010
500 Year Old Fig Tree in El Huerto del Rey Moro, Seville, Spain. I try to visit this old lady whenever I go back. I spent many a day under her branches.
