Installation view from Dreams and Effigies (to be burnt). Courtesy: the artist and Bett Gallery.

Standing by the brown snake, aka the Brisbane River, Georgia Morgan had an apparition of her mother as a sixteen year old, standing by the river that runs through her kampong (village) and separates it from the rubber plantations on the other side. The feeling was something like déjà vu —a superimposition across time and place. Georgia never learnt to speak Tamil, her mother’s language. Her jungle no longer exists and there are no photos for Georgia to reconstruct it in her mind’s eye. At the bank of the brown snake, her vision is pure embodied intuition. Or lawless deep learning.

There is something of this intuition in Georgia’s paintings, a palimpsest of devotional déjà vu. Neither painting nor Tamil is Georgia’s mother tongue, but something subliminal emerges in the doing. A pattern is detected in the psychic data. Her paintings are layered—painted over and started again. In the way that a local council might buff or roll paint over graffiti, the original is obscured but never truly lost or excised. In Dreams and Effigies (to be burnt), destruction is envisioned as a ritual rebirth. A new language emerges from cryptomnesiac tongues.