A journey of reading, listening to, and being enveloped by the Top End natural landscapes is documented through an experimental art practice of body print and ink making.
Emma Lupin is an environmental educator, multi-disciplinary artist, photographer, and Environmental Scientist with many years' experience caring for country alongside First Nations rangers. Identity, connection to country, ethno-botany and love for tropical, native environments are recurring themes. Emma shares stories through photography, print making, natural dyeing and fibre projects. Colours of Country marks Emma's first solo exhibition.
These works comprise of body prints, using natural inks, leaves, nature print collage and plant-dyed silks reflecting our connection to the natural world; through our skin we merge into our surroundings and landscape, to this country. Our skin is similar in form to the skin of fruit and other plants and beings - joining the incredible array of natural beings. Drawing on these connections, the works underline skin as a tangible method of absorbing the world.
Intimate sessions between the artist and friends capture moments in time, through the unique print of each person. The resulting beautifully abstract images question how we interpret our form, suggesting we might be any aspect of the surrounding world.
Natural inks distilled from plants that allow us to breathe, their marks and stains describe how we collect, connect and interact with landscapes. The journeys of discovering and making these inks form part of the art, creating artefacts prior to marking their paper, powerfully relating stories of connections to place.
The artworks have evolved over years, the largest pieces formed over four years, weathered in their tropical home, eaten by insects, changing colours. Nothing is forever, yet colonial museums attempt to preserve the physical, capturing and controlling notions of art.
In an ever-changing world things fade and degrade, grow and expand. In creating art, nothing is ever finished, the process of creation is the art itself and the pieces created are not 'finished,' endlessly changing over time.
Parallels capturing the essence of Emma's art practice that resonate include the Japanese concept of Mono No Aware (#hon). Often considered untranslatable. Mono No Aware (the pathos of things) references bittersweet realisations of the ephemeral nature of all things; that everything is temporary. Fleeting youth, fading romance, or changing seasons are not to be mourned, rather cherished and appreciated in their impermanence, for that is where their beauty arises.