Description
Sarah BELL
Victoria
Say You’ll Watch Over Me
2023
oil on linen
76 x 69cm framed
My art is underpinned by the geographic, cultural, and historical understanding of place. I have painted this section of the Toowoomba River, which is one of NSW’s most pristine, and flows to Nullica, (Twofold Bay) through Yuin lands.
This piece emerged upon my return to this site where I once lived, off-grid. Nostalgia and personal memory enveloped me, within the larger context of dispossession and colonisation. Decades of logging will have contributed to the 2020 wildfires, destroying many historic human dwellings, bush and fauna. Although an altered landscape, burnt skeletal outlines of distant hills all around, melaleucas reduced to ashen forms, these giant river gums endured. On this river bend, the lyrebirds and kingfishers have returned, the tide continues to ebb and flow and the white-bellied sea eagles nest and fish. The title, inspired by Bernard Fanning’s song, reflects an anthropomorphic imagining of a lyrebird’s call as a dawn mourning prayer for her lost love.
