Lisa Sewards’s interest in parachutes stems from family lore. Her mother, who spent several childhood years in a European refugee camp, related a memory from that time of finding a silk parachute left over from the war. Its silk fabric was turned into ribbons for her hair.
“There are really limited photos of her when she was a child,” Sewards says, “but there is one with these ribbons.”
In 2012, with this story in mind, Sewards began sourcing World War II parachutes from military traders. These hang in her studio like dangling ghosts, their imagery making its way again and again into her etchings and paintings.
New exhibition Thousand kisses deep continues this exploration, but dives beneath the ocean into the Chuuk Lagoon (previously Truk Lagoon) in Micronesia: the location of Operation Hailstone in World War II and the “resting place for hundreds of sunken vessels, aircrafts and their ghosts.”
Glowing corals as well as medusozoa – jellyfish whose shapes clearly resemble parachutes, inhabit Chuuk Lagoon. In Sewards’s work, these merge into ‘para-jellies’ – suspended in the still water, their ambiguous forms “reference the underwater time capsule that’s there at the moment,” as Sewards puts it.
A key installation, The Fractured Lagoons, will see an installation of small silk parachutes – used by pilots to release the full-size chutes – hung in front of a full wall of etchings. Glowing softly blue, these intricate etchings describe coral forms, providing an eerie, still backdrop to the suspended parachute bodies.
Thousand kisses deep layers history and natural forms in a compelling, poetic reimagining of the underwater landscape.
Thousand kisses deep
Lisa Sewards
Fortyfivedownstairs
6 March – 17 March
65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is an extraordinary account of the unique art of this continent, published alongside a landmark exhibition at the Potter Museum of Art. Necessary and urgent, it tells the story of Indigenous Australian art; a new art history unlike anything we’ve seen. For Jane O’Sullivan, it’s a remarkable and must-read book.
In a new series of illustrated postcards available as a free gift with purchase only at the Art Guide Bookstore, Oslo Davis takes on classic and contemporary art terms and genres and reimagines what they could be referring to.
With so much to choose from, we’ve rounded up the major summer exhibitions in each capital city, open all summer long. Spanning Yayoi Kusama, Magritte, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, and many more.
bagan bariwariganyan: echoes of country, curated by Jonathan Jones and now showing at Bundanon, highlights a long history of Indigenous art on the New South Wales south coast, with works and installations from Jones, Aunty Julie Freeman, Aunty Cheryl Davison, and Mickey of Ulladulla.
For Lardil and Yangkaal writer and curator Maya Hodge, Archie Moore’s presentation at this year’s Venice Biennale is a powerful symbol of reckoning—one that asks the world to bear witness to the long shadows of colonial violence and clears space for possibilities ahead.
Bringing together 70 artists from 30 countries, the 11th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art fosters connections across cultures and borders, and translates cultural knowledge for the present day.
