Nature Mort. Still-life.

Nature Mort. Still-life.
In memoriam of all the little lives lost..

Stevie Fieldsend returned to her South Coast campsite near Lake Conjola – on Dharawal and Yuin country in the aftermath of the Black Summer fires in 2019-2020.

‘It felt like walking into a sepiatic photo - an an eerie blackened still life.’ The silence and stillness of country after catastrophic fires -palpable. The absence of flora and fauna right to the water’s edge – no escape - devastating.

No visits from the resident possum, No sign of the daily regular king parrots, rozella’s or any birds for that matter, nor any wallaby’s, wombats or kangaroo’s not even the hum of one busy cicada buzz.  Only newly crowned ants and mosquitoes. Trees leavelesss and charcoal. Grasses, plants, bushflower’s decimated dusty ash. Nature mort massacre.

Back in her studio months and years later she memorialises the black summer tragedy with her series of sculptures for the installation Nature Mort -still-life.

The sap-like ooze of molten glass burning into the fissures of blackened found sleeper logs that catch and refract light. The sculptures are redolent of life stilled, but also of the fierceness and beauty of the life force – a theme that is constant in Fieldsend’s art. Set on cast darkened concrete slabs, the installation takes the guise of a grave site.  A ‘memento mori’; at once paean and lament.

A requiem for all the littles deaths and to remember that the land and animals are still deeply affected.