Maree Azzopardi won the $15,000 Gosford Art Prize 2024 in September and has recently won The Signature Art Prize PLC Armidale, Best Work on Paper Award 2024 with work from The Crossings series. This exhibition showcases a suite of works on paper from the award winning series, along with 5 mixed media on canvas paintings plus a selection of Azzopardi's most recent ceramics, continuing in clay, her gestural mark making and narrative that informs The Crossings.
The Crossings:
"The Crossings continues my ongoing dialogue about migration, war and climate change. I use scavenged, burnt charcoal I have found washed up on the beach near my studio, hand-crushed and then mixed with sumi ink. This blackened debris is a metaphor for the many deaths of migrants on boats overturning at sea, in a tragedy that is repeated daily.
The Cross (and the Crucifixion) has been a recurring element in my work as both a religious theme and a maritime symbol. Over the years, it has evolved to express my belief, concern and outrage, very much like my using 'The F-word' as both a celebration and an expletive of anger and frustration."
In The Crossings, Azzopardi maps out her world using bold symbolism, spiritual allegory and poetic rendering. Graphic markings can be interpreted as fences dividing fields in a monochrome landscape, with white lines painted on asphalt. Her legible phrases and unreadable scrawl can be seen as simultaneously providing a message and whispering an incantation.
In Azzopardi's growing series, as well as mirroring the iconography of the Crucifixion, the Cross becomes an intersection, a stop sign, a border crossing and a symbol signifying a place for hope and prayer. Each new work can be seen as an excavation and an obliteration, a territory of masking and revealing. The paint is smeared on, and washed away. With a nod to romanticism, the cross also references the swash-buckling tradition of how "X marks the spot" on a pirate's map, indicating where the treasure is buried.
Jonathan Turner
