The Secret Garden is a delicate yet persuasive elaboration of the metaphysical self where the wilderness of childhood is pervade in a body of figurative semi utopian works crafting Australian botanical forms as totemic symbols to express emotional states of being.
From infancy Lori has lived in rural settings encompassing both domesticated and wild landscapes. The deep and abiding affiliation with the land, charged with a fanciful temperament created the perfect climate to inhabit the natural world and ethereal all at once. It was in this sheltered intimacy “The Secret Garden’ flourished and laid seed to ripen with age. It became and still is a place of reflection and resolve, sight and insight. Resolute in times of unease, it stills the body and composes mindfulness.
I believe our connection to our landscape is momentous for physical and psychological fitness and health. Intrinsic to our being, it heightens our senses and reconnects us to our inherited sensory memories of family and community and in turn bonds us. Even without being present to a landscape, the garden of memory within generates a space of nurture and principal. Our depth, heart, soul.
These paintings explore my character memories influenced by nature, but I don’t wish them to be defined as mine or by mine. I ask you the viewer to couple your own reflections back through your being and reawaken your own garden, weeds and blossoms alike, to revisit the attributes of your own shaping.
