Excerpt from TRACE ELEMENTS

 

 

'The themes of metamorphosis and the interrelatedness of created life are central to these works by Angela Hackett. Even in the most fluidly ethereal of her paintings and drawings, the vegetative and creaturely leave trace elements, or image each other. In celebrating the mysteries of the natural world, the artist combines a highly focused study of the actual with a spacious, exploratory tapping into conscious and unconscious images. Hence the resonance and poetic power of her work, even while it invites us to attend to the transient, substantial life of nature around us, within us.

 

Words are indeed a butterfly net when set to catch something of the life of these paintings and drawings with their inspired and courageous lyricism, their stark essentialness: conundrums of the real. It is a relief to step back into the silence in which their images and colours exist only in their own quiet splendour and truth, both purifying and enlivening vision, taking root in the soul.'

 

 

Diane Fahey

Barwon Heads, Victoria

 

Diane Fahey’s seventh collection of poems is “The Sixth Swan”. She holds an M.A. in Literature and a PhD in Creative Writing for her study “Places and Spaces of the Writing Life”.