‘I think of golden grain like granules of the sun—or the particles that comprise us—being illuminated.

I have long envisaged a “human animal” in its earliest mythic mindset and generic form, encountering its environment in a first state of awakening, transforming its surroundings through the wonderful capabilities of mind. Fundamentally, this concept has inspired much of what I do, both in terms of subject and as an imagined ideal approach to working.

In this group of large figurative paintings in which I imagined the “shadow-form” of my own body projected into a newly awakened state of consciousness, as if it were witness to the first light of a waking dream. I imagine this source of light to be similar to that which illuminates behind closed eyes—an unearthly glow that penetrates the surface of physical things and exposes the substructures of the environment surrounding us.

In this state of primal awareness, I depict my own shadow as a kind of “nature spirit” (a magical creature) with enlivened senses, like a spore cross-pollinating with other receptive organs, transmitting song throughout a state of wilderness—so that its environment becomes enchanted. It emits radiant exhalations and is beholden by the birth of its own song, like a dawn chorus.

When I depict a figure that relates to the actual scale of the body, it somehow seems as if that depiction has been extracted from the body itself—like a luminous shadow projected upon the surface. In depicting the form of a body within a painted space, it is as if the paint becomes a literal skin: a cladding for the body of a spirit that resides in another realm, like an interdimensional being.

The figures in the paintings appear frieze-like, as if they were cross-section diagrams of psychic beings for a biology illustration. They harvest nutrients in an Arcadian shadow-orchard on the other side of consciousness. They are images of a body awoken within a dream—of a king-harvest in the fertile ground of my own shadow, under a midnight sun.”

~ Peter Graham

Opening celebration: Saturday, 2 August 2-4pm