Hayley McFarlane

I am interested in the beauty that exists as part of a continuum, not as a permanent and fixed ideal, a beauty reflected in Herman Bahr’s theories of an eternal connectedness of all things. In my series of works, Eternal Beauty: Bones, I abandon the symbolism of death that has permeated the bones of human history. Instead I transitioned the static back bone of a fish through the printed image into another space and function.

Herman Bahr describes eternal as ‘the dependency of each thing upon every other in the unending chain of what exists’ (Bahr in Frisby 1986, p 11). He talks about the eternal as transitional; and in it there arises a beauty in continually changing and evolving.

I see American painter Georgia O’Keeffe embodying this concept when she used sun-bleached animal bones found in the desert around her New Mexico home to symbolise the eternal beauty of the desert. Her work talks about sacred time:  ‘sensing time as a cyclical process which periodically renews itself’ (Cummings 2004).

As Celia Weisman reads in O’Keefe’s work, her creation of a passage between earthly and transcendent spheres ‘permits viewers to sense both death and life simultaneously’ (Weisman 1983, p 13).  ‘Like the changing of seasons and the moon’s cycles, animal life is seen undergoing transformations, and life and death are again revealed as two phases within one process’ (Weisman 1983, p 13). 

Through focusing on fragments of the fish bones, I use notions of minimalism and abstraction as Nathan Cabot describes, to transmit reality of nature – or the feelings that nature creates inside of me – to the picture surface, and transform weathered facades, jagged edges, irregular openings, and convex and concave surfaces into the beauty that I see connected in and to the creative place of death in the rotations of nature.

My other influences include Clara Clieu; for her balance between the gestural and free form and the hard and sharp edge, Jude Roberts; for her use of weathered paper to capture elements of transformation, and Xia Xiaowan; for his layered presentation, giving the illusion of depth as the images change and shift when the viewer walks around his work.