Suspended Embrace September 29 - October 15, 2022
Marine Works
The ocean has always felt like home to me.
As a child growing up in Adelaide, I spent entire summers at Aldinga Reef with my siblings and childhood companions — hours lost in rock pools, spotting crabs, shark eggs, jellyfish and squid. I remember the sheer delight of it, that particular kind of childhood wonder where the world feels endlessly mysterious and alive. I also remember squealing hysterically after pulling an angry squid from the water and getting covered in black ink. The ocean had a sense of humour, even then.
Those memories never left me. They became a kind of pictorial language I didn't fully understand until much later.
It was at Culburra Beach on the south coast of New South Wales that everything came back. I had been through something enormous — staring down my own mortality has a way of clarifying what matters — and I found myself wading through shallow water, watching the tide ebb and flow over the rocks. Beneath the surface, a whole world was going about its business. Quietly. Persistently. Utterly indifferent to everything happening above it.
I was watching the water move over the rocks and could see the small marine life beneath — it reminded me of my happiest childhood memories and I really felt alive again.
That moment sent me straight to the studio. I picked up a watercolour brush because nothing else could do what I needed — that subtle fluidity, the way water moves and carries light, the way it simultaneously reveals and obscures. Watercolour doesn't lie. It asks you to surrender to it, and in that surrender something true can emerge.
I limited myself deliberately to two subjects — the crab and the squid. Constraints, I've learned, are not the enemy of creativity. They are the condition for it. Within that limitation I found infinite variation — in form, in light, in the strange quiet personalities each creature seemed to carry. There is chance in these works, a wildness in the medium itself, but it is chance held carefully — guided rather than controlled.
These are not scientific studies. They are conversations. Each creature has a presence, a stillness, something it seems to want to communicate if you're willing to look long enough. The ocean taught me that. It always has.
The only true teacher is nature. I keep returning to her, and she keeps showing me something new.
Essay by Ken McGregor, 2022
