Anna Sabadini: Musings on 'Home'...

Anna Sabadini writes about her latest body of works Home, which can be seen at Artereal throughout September...

Lounge Room Looking East, 2010, oil on canvas, 180 x 215cm

"I am interested in different representations of reality, the relationship between what we look at and what we think we know. Whereas light in Western painting is a metaphor for knowing (European light revealing forms, illuminating, making clear), light for me, in an Australian context is the ‘other’ – it is the metaphor for the unknowable, for unknowing, that paradoxically informs place. Familiarity with the light, at different times of the year, at different times of the day, despite the fact that it can confuse forms, creates intimacy. Light playing off surfaces, suffusing the air, at times displaces the perception of where those surfaces are. The edges of other bodies are made unclear, or, seductive. As I walk around my home, I pay attention to how my perception is suspended in the glare, shine, dazzle, glimmer, shimmer, radiance, flare and glow of light hitting and being reflected off the things around me. As I walk outside, looking at landforms and ocean around my home, I notice how the moisture in the air settles a haze over everything, binding sea and islands, mountains, forest and sky into a seamless entity. The further away things are, the bluer they look; blue is like a local perspective that tells of the distance between you and the object through the thickness of air. The quality of the blue also tells about the light, humidity, season and the region.

Intimacy with place continuously desires renegotiation: this, for me, represents a willingness to be in relationship with both the known and unknown. If the craft of painting produces an artefact concerned with sight and how we see, of seeing, I am interested in being seduced, if not occasionally blinded, by the light. With the breakdown and melding of edges I want to capture the feeling of never being able to capture the truth of what I am looking at; of being in flux with what I’m looking at. Knowing this is not alienating for me. Painting subjects of home, playing with this aspect of the known and unknown allows me to re-state, to re-know the familiar. Ultimately, in not knowing, there is a sense of beyond myself. I am at home with this, with edges being dissolved." 

Anna Sabadini's solo exhibition Home is currently on exhibition at Artereal until the 2 September, 2010.