Empty vessels 2 May 2020

A sighing rushing wind all day with clouds like commas. A variety of vessels waiting to be filled, with incense or food, water or wine.  What you find in any archaeological site in the Mediterranean, or even a terraced hill or field, is fragments of ceramic, potsherds in teeming abundance, from every kind of container: cups, jugs, mixing jars, sieves, cooking pots, stemmed wine bowls, great storage vessels, amphorae, perfume vessels, oil bottles, water pots, plates, small dishes and great basins, sometimes baths, all made from fired clay. Even when broken it does not decay. All these containers were all made from clay, all signify relationships, people handing things to one another, eating together, loading stores or serving at table. Once with an archaeologist in Crete we walked on a rainy winter day along a road outside Knossos, and he stooped and picked out a curved fragment of white pottery revealed by the rain, rubbed it with his thumb and handed it to me, saying "Middle Minoan 2B". There was a sprig of leaves, in pale red.  Waiting and emptiness is alright. A different moment will come.

Diana Wood Conroy 'Empty vessels' watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm, 2 May 2020.

Italian jug, 1 May 2020

A cold bright wind today, snow on the mountains. I shopped in the Coles shopping mall in the next suburb and the place was abandoned, all the shops were closed except for the supermarket. Even the whirligig cars for children to ride in were immobilised in black plastic. Sitting far apart with sad faces, people waited at the bus stop. Thinking of small communities I woke with the image of this jug in my head and the village where I saw pots like this being made, a tiny poor place called Grottaglie in south Italy. Every family was involved in some aspect of making the glazed earthenware. Every object has its biography and I bought this pot for a few lire because I loved its trefoil spout and the yellow flower with tendrils. It has an echo of much older ceramics from this area, once Magna Graecia. A jug is for pouring, and I thought, looking at the people I saw today persisting with daily tasks, we look alright from the outside still with some flowers and tendrils, but in reality we are all poured out, there's nothing much left inside.

Diana Wood Conroy 'Italian jug' watercolour on Arches paper 15 x 21 cm, 1 May 2020.

Table in the rain, 30 April 2020

The house becomes an archaic structure in the inturned landscape of rain, combined with isolation. I thought about the Roman domus, how there was always a shrine to the Lares and Penates, the gods of the household, who ensured the careful ordering of things, preventing accidents and chaos. Small offerings were placed before their altar at the entrance to the house. As a girl in South Italy, I remember the saucers of milk left out by the front door for the house snake who looked after those chthonic underground forces that might upset everything. Could a king parrot be a sign? Birds were used  to foretell the future.  Aboriginal friends see birds as deliberate messengers, sometimes communicating death, but also a birth, or visitors. The saint's red of the king parrot's breast feathers are said by the Yolngu to have turned crimson in the brilliant rays of the first sunrise, the day the creation ancestors arrived on the land.I will assume then, that for the parrot to arrive at our table is a sign of new beginnings. 

Diana Wood Conroy 'Table in the rain' watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm, 30 April, 2020.

Night with flying fox, 29 April 2020

A waxing crescent moon, and the evening star nearby. Almost invisibly a flying fox swoops over, like a small wind passing. In the absence of distraction the old shapes and presences of the Dharrawal land reappear, their great antiquity overlaid, but still there after two hundred and fifty years of white people. For old Europeans the moon was a female goddess, Artemis, but for northern Tiwi and Yolngu people whom I've known the moon is a man, and the sun is a woman.  The moon is responsible for bringing death to the world, he grows very sick until he is no more than a sliver of bone, and vanishes into the sea. But then, he comes up alive again and grows fat.   In the old Greek stories stars and flowers are related, you can paint a canopy in your tomb with either stars or blossoms. For the Yolngu the symbols of the evening star are the lotus and the waterlily.

Diana Wood Conroy. 'Night with flying fox, watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm, 29 April 2020

Cockatoos and spider, 28 April 2020

The image arrives in the fluidity of watercolour, swimming into focus. A vista, as is traditional in the longstanding British tradition that really invented watercolour, looks outward to the view. It seems as if the painter may be in control, as if it might be really possible to frame what is all around. But hardwon insights from being with other kinds of artists indicate that in fact the country is looking back at the observer. Those cockatoos and the spider are observing me and taking note, and know precisely what my movements might be through the day. The shapes of the country are inside as well as outside, there is a reciprocity. 

In the story Arachne the weaver from Lydia challenges the high goddess Athena to a weaving contest. Athena weaves the Council of the Gods, but Arachne weaves the gods' transgressions, with the Rape of Europa. Out raged by Arachne's impudence and talent, Athena changes her into a spider. The spider still hides herself and keeps weaving despite her low status. Baraka was the spider woman who made the first funeral baskets in the first funeral ceremony in the Tiwi Islands. Unlike Arachne, her status as a creation ancestor, embedded in country, has never been disputed. 

Diana Wood Conroy, 'Cockatoos and spider' watercolour on Arches paper, 15 x 21 cm, 28 April, 2020.