Inner Reserve
by Mikhaela Rodwell
Catalogue text, MAC Yapang
January 2026                                  

Lucas Davidson knows this lake. He grew up here on Awabakal country, beside and in the lake. He remembers finishing school for the day and knowing he had hours to fill by its shores, exploring as far as a bike could take him. He remembers wading chest-deep through clear water, of the sky mirrored in the lake’s surface, and his first experiences of reflection, of immersion, of being awed, buoyed, soothed. He remembers a sense of vastness and of intimacy, of feeling attuned to his environment and his body. He remembers feeling alive. 

I too grew up beside a lake, though it was much less romantically called a ‘basin’. Lucas and I have joked together that we were primed for Rothko from an early age, after so many early years looking to the horizon across the water. Sometimes soft rain clouds would settle just above the feathered outline of the far casuarinas. Or the sun would set between bars of stratus, creating multiple horizons above the line of land and out across the water. For the last few years Lucas has been meditating on these horizons. He has been making and

re-making them in the studio, layering samples of the work of others to suggest an environment, cutting up his own archive to find a balance between his outer world and his inner life. He has looked to the horizon as a type of thought process, a space of calm meditation, through which some sense of equilibrium can be restored. 

To put it plainly, Lucas could have died. Several years ago he was diagnosed with cancer, and began a long treatment which narrowed his world and focused his attention. His usual activities were impossible. His energy for exhibitions was gone. There was no knowing where the cancer might go, and there was no line of sight into the future. He relinquished almost everything that he knew in pursuit of his own life. And, as he will tell you, two activities sustained him: looking out across an expanse of water towards the horizon, and spending time with his art books, immersed in the work of the artists he loves. Over time, he began re-photographing photographs of these works as a way of attuning his attention, of staying present in the world in which he still lived. And then he began collaging them together into new terrains, vivid, dematerialised and yet materially evocative, portals into worlds beyond and underneath, with multiple expanses and horizons, outside linear time.

Lucas has told me that he is not sure that the works work. He knows the process of making them works, because when making them he feels the sense of flow and presence that he feels in and beside water. He would like the work to do this for us, his audience. He would like us to know the same freedom and quietude. But he is not sure it does, or that it can. I find this surprising, even provocative. We are accustomed to the exhibited artwork being realised, successful. We expect that, for an exhibition to exist, there has been some resolution by the artist, which has determined what is on display. We assume the artwork has gained some level of autonomy, in which its meaning has been demarcated, and that it is then our work to go about discovering it. 

But perhaps it is not surprising, when it has been made by someone who has, as Jacqueline Rose describes it, ‘lived death’. Lucas has looked straight at the searing reality that most of us keep out of sight: that we will die. He has been beyond the horizon and under the lake, in deep pain, immersed in the unknowable. Few of us can begin to imagine what it is like to

re-emerge from that place, or what one finds in those depths and brings back to the shore. Perhaps then, it is a provocation, to offer something so simple for contemplation: that Lucas is here, now. In the studio, surrounded by strips of colour, ephemera, mementos, repetitions. In this world, with its dappled light, its lapping tides, its blue screens of horrors, its ferocious will to exist. And here again by the lake, alive, sharing with us his process, inviting us to join him in this present moment.