The stage is set: cup with painted fish, April 3 2020

We are all in retreat, each house a little monastery along the street. People walk past each other as they go in opposite directions exercising up and down the road and call out "Are you alright?" "Yes, I'm OK are you?" The objects on my table perform memories - a little model of a theatre bought from a hawker beside the road in Ephesus in Turkey; a replica in resin of a Cycladic bowl once carved of stone, and a netted porcelain cup with the golden skeleton of a fish by Henrietta Farrelly-Barnett bought recently in Canberra.  But I grieve the unravelling of ordinary life, the great silence of gathering places without people, almost archaeological.

A lament from Euripides' Iphigeneia in Taurus: ' kingfisher, you who sing a sad song round the rocky headlands of the sea... I, a wingless bird compete with you in lamentation as I long for the market-places of the Greeks..'

Diana Wood Conroy 'The stage is set: cup with painted fish' watercolour on Arches paper 15 x 21cm, 3 April 2020.