Square of Sunlight: Curated by Helen Gory
There is an ancient Kabbalistic story that tells of the relationship between light and dark. Before time as we know it, the divine drew breath and with it came darkness. Ten vessels were then filled with holy light to pierce the dark, but they were too fragile to hold such power and so they shattered, scattering the holy light like stars across the lands.
And so now, in an imperfect world, shards of light can always be found. What is broken always carries the hope of being made anew.
We are living in the wake of a collective exile of sorts, a pandemic that has upended what we have known and shown the dark fault lines in our societies both local and global. Our worlds simultaneously, paradoxically, expanded through digital connectivity and contracted to the bounds of our homes, our streets, our local communities. Constraint, though, can be a fertile place; as with the shattered vessels, light always comes in the wake of darkness.
More than ever, art is a place of sense-making, of meaning-making. A means of both provocation and consolation, for ourselves and for our communities. The ten artists chosen here are all local women working in painterly forms, artists whose diverse practices have been shaped this past year by the limitations (and freedoms) of the global pandemic—shaped by home, children, domesticity, solitude. In remaking the familiar, in the details of life, art can be a way forward to collective hope, the promise of a future unbounded, pierced with light.
- Helen Gory and Sarah Gory
The title Square of Sunlight is borrowed from Judith Wright’s poem ‘The Sisters’ (1949)
