STAGES
LIFE IN LOCKDOWN
Monash Gallery of Art
29 May - 29 Aug 2021
Life in lockdown are photographs by people who lived through Victoria’s lockdowns during 2020 and 2021 as a result of the COVID-19 global pandemic.
Participants responded to MGA’s callout for photographs that encapsulate individual experiences of life in these lockdowns.
Growing progressively throughout the course of the exhibition and resulting in an explosion of images across MGA’s Atrium Gallery walls, this exhibition documents the lived experiences of people in our community, providing a cultural record of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Embodying the Ancestors
Archival digital print, 2020
“Immersed in the cauldron heat of the indigo vat, the soil of my ancestral home seeps into my skin. Dye leaves its blue stain. Blue skin, the colour of gods, oceans and distant mountains, of yearnings, work and toil. My hand is swollen with the bodies of my ancestors, full with their inheritances, their poisons, their medicines and their gifts. As a first generation Anglo-Indian Australian, complex histories of colonisation are written in my bones. Colonizer and colonised, oppression and rebellion, stream through my veins, woven into my DNA. Only half truths are told, only some stories are spoken. My Assamese great-grandmother holds out her hand to me. I take it and wade through lotus fields, following as she guides beyond space, in the folds of time, at home in her company.
During the extended lockdown of 2020, I began working with natural indigo, developed from indigo plants grown in the earth of my paternal homelands and imported across the same vast ocean that my father had traversed by ship to reach these shores. Indigo and silks were materials that I could work with from home. As I dyed the silks under the dark liquid surface, indigo penetrated my skin. During that period of isolation, when so much was virtual and bereft of touch, these silks and dark vats of burnished gold connected me viscerally across time and space, with the long history of indigo, once the most valuable commodity on the globe, and with a personal history, bound up with empire, colonisation, slavery, and by contrast, the traditions and arts of the Indigenous Peoples of Assam and my own great grandmother.”