Journey Home - winner of the Association Of Commonwealth Universities Art Prize in a competition titled "...a place in the world."
Photographic documentation of Journey Home drawing, February – December
Journey Home
Charcoal and charcoal pencil on Dessin 300gsm paper
150 x 132 cms
Collection of the Association of Commonwealth Universities, London
Artist's Statement
The drawing Journey Home is about the African Diaspora, white and black, ordinary people like myself who have been displaced and dispossessed, far from home. My work is autobiographical; it is about the retrieval of history as memory and memory as history. I am drawing to be reconciled, it is also the process of undoing of persistent memories, acknowledged and unacknowledged, like baggage . . . only to take what is essential for the new life.
Poet, Oscar Wilde stated “Disobedience in the eyes of anyone who has read history is man’s original virtue”. When I think of disobedience I think of Mahatma Gandhi’s civil disobedience, an idea that developed whilst he struggled against the hardship of living under the early days of Apartheid in South Africa. I believe in the use of passive resistance and civil disobedience to deflect political conflict, as this supports a more permanent peaceful resolution of differences rather than violent confrontation.
I have lived under the old world of Apartheid and was fortunate to see it fall; I have lived the story of Zimbabwe and seen what Robert Mugabe has done in his sweep of tribal/ethnic cleansing. Diaspora is a very old story and it is one I understand. Many times I have seen people put their lives into a cardboard box and walk, no-where, anywhere, to a haven under the stars.
I promised myself if I ever did find a safe distance I would use that gift, that luxury, to draw and to remap my journey, as I believe that personal is universal.
In his First Diasporist Manifesto the artist Kitaj writes” I want to be a tribal remembrancer, wrestling with my Diasporic angel . . . (I have) . . . great affection for this emancipating muse.”[1]
My reading has led me to Identity Politics and Ian Mclean who claims that colonialism has thrown us all, indigenous and migrant into the same undifferentiated space of loss for the origin or home that no longer exists. For the colonisers and the colonised, we are all rootless and afloat.[2] Post 9/11 we have all been plunged into the maelstrom of a world off centre that the Postmodernist well has sprung from. Everybody here is Diasporic, we all have to make our own journey home.
Lauryn Arnott
April 2006
[1] Kitaj, Ronald, B First Diasporist Manifesto, Thames and Hudson, 1989 p39
[2] Mclean, Ian and Gordon Bennett The Art of Gordon Bennett, Craftsman House, Australia, 1996
The Journey Home ~ winner of the Association of Commonwealth Universities Art Prize in a competition titled ".... a place in the world", awarded by Nobel aureate author, John M. Coetzee: View link:
Association of Commonwealth Universities Art Prize
Publication: - essay and photographic documentation
Arnott, Lauryn. ‘Journey Home: suitcase or coffin?’ included in Writers, Writing on Conflicts and Wars in Africa , an anthology co-edited by Okey Ndibe and Chengari Hove. Sponsored by the Nordic Africa Institute. Published by Adonis & Abbey ... Publishers, London, 2009. Lauryn’s essay includes photographic documentation of the methodology behind her Journey Home drawing, which relates the violence of her country’s history and the loss of her home in Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe’s regime before she migrated to Australia . The ideas from this essay have been drawn from her Masters of Visual Art thesis, undertaken at Adelaide Central School of Art, awarded in 2007.
Review by Ikhide R Ikheeloa- EMAIL FROM AMERICA
Of Writers, Writing on Conflicts and Wars in Africa « Ikhide
View Articles & Reviews
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © LAURYN ARNOTT
Journey Home
Charcoal and charcoal pencil on Dessin 300gsm paper
150 x 132 cms
Collection of the Association of Commonwealth Universities, London
Artist's Statement
The drawing Journey Home is about the African Diaspora, white and black, ordinary people like myself who have been displaced and dispossessed, far from home. My work is autobiographical; it is about the retrieval of history as memory and memory as history. I am drawing to be reconciled, it is also the process of undoing of persistent memories, acknowledged and unacknowledged, like baggage . . . only to take what is essential for the new life.
Poet, Oscar Wilde stated “Disobedience in the eyes of anyone who has read history is man’s original virtue”. When I think of disobedience I think of Mahatma Gandhi’s civil disobedience, an idea that developed whilst he struggled against the hardship of living under the early days of Apartheid in South Africa. I believe in the use of passive resistance and civil disobedience to deflect political conflict, as this supports a more permanent peaceful resolution of differences rather than violent confrontation.
I have lived under the old world of Apartheid and was fortunate to see it fall; I have lived the story of Zimbabwe and seen what Robert Mugabe has done in his sweep of tribal/ethnic cleansing. Diaspora is a very old story and it is one I understand. Many times I have seen people put their lives into a cardboard box and walk, no-where, anywhere, to a haven under the stars.
I promised myself if I ever did find a safe distance I would use that gift, that luxury, to draw and to remap my journey, as I believe that personal is universal.
In his First Diasporist Manifesto the artist Kitaj writes” I want to be a tribal remembrancer, wrestling with my Diasporic angel . . . (I have) . . . great affection for this emancipating muse.”[1]
My reading has led me to Identity Politics and Ian Mclean who claims that colonialism has thrown us all, indigenous and migrant into the same undifferentiated space of loss for the origin or home that no longer exists. For the colonisers and the colonised, we are all rootless and afloat.[2] Post 9/11 we have all been plunged into the maelstrom of a world off centre that the Postmodernist well has sprung from. Everybody here is Diasporic, we all have to make our own journey home.
Lauryn Arnott
April 2006
[1] Kitaj, Ronald, B First Diasporist Manifesto, Thames and Hudson, 1989 p39
[2] Mclean, Ian and Gordon Bennett The Art of Gordon Bennett, Craftsman House, Australia, 1996
The Journey Home ~ winner of the Association of Commonwealth Universities Art Prize in a competition titled ".... a place in the world", awarded by Nobel aureate author, John M. Coetzee: View link:
Association of Commonwealth Universities Art Prize
Publication: - essay and photographic documentation
Arnott, Lauryn. ‘Journey Home: suitcase or coffin?’ included in Writers, Writing on Conflicts and Wars in Africa , an anthology co-edited by Okey Ndibe and Chengari Hove. Sponsored by the Nordic Africa Institute. Published by Adonis & Abbey ... Publishers, London, 2009. Lauryn’s essay includes photographic documentation of the methodology behind her Journey Home drawing, which relates the violence of her country’s history and the loss of her home in Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe’s regime before she migrated to Australia . The ideas from this essay have been drawn from her Masters of Visual Art thesis, undertaken at Adelaide Central School of Art, awarded in 2007.
Review by Ikhide R Ikheeloa- EMAIL FROM AMERICA
Of Writers, Writing on Conflicts and Wars in Africa « Ikhide
View Articles & Reviews
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © LAURYN ARNOTT
