A Picture of Health
by Lucas Davidson
Catalogue text, Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney
March 2024
A Picture of Health looks to the natural world as a source of restoration, presence and renewal. Developed over the course of a year while I underwent treatment for cancer, these small-scale collages can be understood as internal landscapes: spaces of pause, reflection and repair.
This body of work emerged during a period when I was unable to access the studio. Returning to accumulated photographic material, I began cutting up existing works and reassembling them into new configurations. Through processes of layering and reconstruction, horizon lines emerged through subtle transitions of colour and tone. The process intentionally pared back visual complexity, shifting attention away from representation and towards the experience of perception itself. Operating between landscape and abstraction, the works resist immediate interpretation. Instead, they invite sustained looking, encouraging a slower and more contemplative mode of attention.
Marine biologist Wallace J. Nichols in his book Blue Mind, suggests that encounters with water and the repetitive patterns found in natural environments can shift neural activity towards more meditative states, fostering feelings of calm, connection and wellbeing. Having long turned to the ocean as a place of solace and renewal, I am interested in how aesthetic experiences might similarly contribute to moments of restoration. Through repeated encounters with colour, rhythm and subtle variation, these works consider how art can shape the quality of our attention, offering a space for reflection amid uncertainty.
At the centre of the gallery, fourteen Tibetan singing bowls are arranged into a column-like form. Traditionally associated with meditation and healing practices, each bowl possesses the capacity to produce a sustained resonance when activated. Here, however, they remain silent. Rather than functioning as instruments to be played, they operate as a gesture towards stillness, foregrounding the importance of cultivating those experiences that restore attention and reconnect us with ourselves and the world around us.
Throughout A Picture of Health, colour, repetition and contemplative practice become ways of attending more carefully to experience. Emerging from a period marked by vulnerability and transformation, the exhibition reflects on the restorative capacities of aesthetic encounter and our enduring relationship with the natural world. In doing so, it offers a space in which viewers might pause, reflect and consider the subtle ways colour, presence and sustained attention can shape how we inhabit difficult experiences.