Geoff Mitchell - Datsun Tran - Friday 17 June - Saturday 9 July 2022

Artist's Statement

Stories from Above

When the pandemic started in early 2020, life changed so quickly and so dramatically for many of us that a lot of people were in utter shock. Some experts suggested it was some sort of mass scale grief. Grief for a world that was now gone. I think deep down, a lot of us were yearning for a revolution of sorts. Something needed to change in our hectic 21st century lives, and change was forced upon us. We needed to adapt, to separate from the status quo and find a new routine. There was some pretty questionable behaviour. But there were also positives when people were forced to slow down. People spent more time with their families, they baked more, they made beautiful gardens. They realised what was important to them when the noise was gone. Suddenly, aeroplanes stopped flying above us, and the streets were empty, the world was taking a collective deep breath.

I revisited the first artforms I learnt. My dad taught me calligraphy and photography when I was a child, but it was something I had stopped doing in my teens. I also started looking up to the stars in the evenings. I looked at all the different constellations and read many versions of stories humans have told themselves from all over the world when they looked up. It’s a relationship we’ve had with the night sky for as long as we’ve been around. Guides to live our lives by.

But in these new times, I wanted new guides. I reached into my past and I created new constellations from stories that were told to me as a child, and stories that I was passing onto my daughter. These were the lifelines I reached out for when the world tilted on its axis, and I needed to hold onto some sort of stability. Family, art and the stars. Classical Chinese paintings tell stories from everyday life, pass on old legends and record momentous events. And these new times contained all of these things. We must all be explorers in this new world. To be brave and bring fire back to others needing warmth and light. We need to step out into the unknown and know that our lifelines, while tenuous, are there to sustain us.