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Sally Marsden, King Island Arts and Culture Centre and Arts and Cultural Development Office, King Island Council.
Thank you Donna for inviting me to open your
exhibition. This is a rare and precious experience for me to witness the final
outcome off the island from one of our residencies at the King Island Cultural
Centre.
Some works within this exhibition result from
Donna’s Visual Journal developed and shared with the King Island community at
the conclusion of her residency. An assemblage of ideas and feelings created
from the elements from both the cultural and environmental landscape of the
island.
Seeing her work in a broader context through
this exhibition I can feel her intense but sensitive emersion into her subject
matter and passion for it – captured in her swift use of paint and brush and
her whole being – an immediacy that for me reflects the whole atmosphere of her
experience and interpretation of often the quite mundane and ordinary in our
physical environment and cultural landscape. As Donna says she explores the
ordinary appearance of things and is interested in finding the essence or
something of the spiritual nature of the place.
The King Island residency program with Arts
Tasmania has been running since 2006 and been getting stronger and stronger
with artists returning with exhibitions and also independent residencies
including artists from Victoria and Northern Territory. For our island community we are totally
enthralled by the individual approaches to the exploration of what the island
may offer to individual artists, arts practice, and the inevitable demands of
isolation on all of us. Our isolation demands flexibility
and adaption.
Artists such as Donna arrive and instantly
with eyes roaming, ears to the ground, sniffing the wind and sea, sweeping up
community members for links, stories, memories, connections, environments to
explore, ideas and explorations unfold and emerge reflecting the character of
place, the mysteries of the ocean, our
ordinary lives, our history, and the
unfolding landscape of a Bass Strait Island.
Donna roamed over windswept rolling hills,
along coastal kelping tracks and beyond with her dog, Walter, in car and
sketches and wet canvases tumbling into the back of the car, as her visual
journal/diary and developed further in the studio at home for this exhibition.
This energy and commitment to her experience and subject matter has been fully
retained and the works I’m sure you would agree retain integrity to her
intentions.
