Exploring the edge of a forest, we are called further into its cradle of trees and rocks. How do they receive us? How do they relate with us? What do they tell us?
If only we could hear their primordial hum, no longer familiar and forgotten.
Consider the immensity and expanse of time, speaking through and to our ancient biology while exploring the purity of nature, our own receptivity to it, and the subtle frequencies when we visit those slow and still silent places.
Our Non-human Psyche is a stunning visual attempt to decentralise the human in our collective narrative – in her collection of finely intricate ink drawings of trees, moss, stones and dry lakes, Lux Eterna invites us to appreciate the overwhelming truth of what we’re not really seeing, what we don’t make time to see, feel and experience. The meditative quality of Lux’s works, are evidenced in repetitive minute details, which tune into and are emblematic of cellular frequencies deep within our non-human kin. Re-instilling a reverence towards these ancient living beings so close to us, in us, perhaps that we can begin to ordain our spirituality in this reality.
We are confronted to consider all that glitters is not gold, where Lux delicately hand foils her works with gold and copper. Recalibrating the place from where we dig out riches, perhaps to where a mirror could be; this new metallic anatomy shifts our focus from the ground and to our non-human kin, also seeing ourselves reflected back in them. These exquisitely ink laced and gold laden vignettes supplant the royalty, religion and pageantry of humankind’s first iconographic art and ritualistic subversions for order out of perceived chaos.
Lux’s show guides us through a space that beckons us to re-kindle our relationship to our prehistoric botanical ancestors and their transformative powers of adaptation, of becoming still, more sensitive and more aware in the face of ecological adversity.
Lux Eterna is an interdisciplinary artist living and working on Wangal Land, Sydney, Australia. Her auto-portrait "Motherland, Here On In" (2017) toured several USA academic, arts and cultural institutions for the exhibition Inherit the Earth (March - October, 2022) and has exhibited in the Venice Biennale, 2022. She is currently producing her next major video/dance work, out in Australia’s central desert landscapes, to feature alongside a developing new body of contemporary drawings for her next major solo show at the Australian Embassy in D.C, USA opening Dec 2023.
Ben Bazevski is a writer, editor, and 2020 winner of the International Geist Poetry Contest.
