From 1969 to1983 I lived on the West Coast of USA, completing a B.F.A in Fibre sculpture at San Francisco University.I had not been aware of the importance of the spirit of my homeIand until it was absent.
During a study of tribal cultures, I experienced affinity with Native American Culture. I was struck by the spirituality of these people, who consider all things equal, respect all things, care for all things and believe that all things have spirit.Native American art celebrates Nature.
By subtly altering, decorating, and formalising nature’s materials, the perception of the quality and role of plant or animal life as man’s spiritual accompaniment is enhanced. Art evokes a living treasure: nature.
Upon return to my homeland Australia, I looked at the environment with more awareness, more reverence, and with what I had learned about ‘nature as a living treasure’ and began looking at plant fibres, with their potential for making paper.
Fred Williams said that he believes an artist essentially only makes one work in his/her lifetime, one central concern that is visited a multitude of times – so an artist revisits the concept that is central to his/her art.This is true of my own work – there has always been a central concern with containment – this concept ensures emotional, spiritual and physical security, and my work with vessels are just that.Vessels conjure a recognition that all living entities emerge from a vessel which has held and nurtured the gestating form from conception to emergence – be it an egg, a cocoon, a uterus, a bud, a seedpod, a shell – the reality is Universal – the inference, the possibility of containment.
Many of my works are figurative, and yet I perceive them as vessels. People are containers of life, of love, of one another. A mother contains the foetus and then emotionally contains her infant bringing him/her to independence and maturity. Women are, in that sense, vessels.
My practise involves a relationship with Nature’s momentum – I find something wonderful in gathering her cast-offs, and, through a number of simple processes, transforming them. The cast-offs that would otherwise decompose are recycled to become new materials, which have a life of their own – thus the beauty inherent in the plant fibre and subtly concealed by the living plant is revealed as new form.
Website: megviney.com
