Genevieve Carroll

An inquisitive child I was, drawing incessantly interior plans and black ink bush silhouettes of hills, attaching a poem to them. The diametric spaces and words captivated my imagination.

The Wattle Room is my diary, with the written words expressed as exhibition chapters. I collage my feelings, dislocated fragments trying to reconcile appearing comic.

I step off my great love of 20th-century poetry and literature with a fascination for the absurd, which is the foundation of my paintings. I express in optimistic bright colours and exaggerate the repetitive motifs to create a humorous Vanitas concept, making up my own symbols as reminders of how to live my life.

Depicting myself as a jug, placing a mobile phone at the variable time I was born, a kitchen table with breasts, seasons, my way of walking, and childhood fears of rats and witches, sparks my imagination within the Hill End landscape, especially at night when the sky is deep with darkness. Hill End and I have a metamorphosis, maybe a Kafkaesque experience.

My sensitivities have been drawn out of me here, giving my thoughts clarity in this most curious landscape of Hill End.

I see it as a place of contradictions and have learned to navigate its eccentric ways, its un-arranged meetings of robust weather conditions. This landscape flourishes and fasts together in isolation. It’s a place where I wrestle between resisting and acceptance.

I ramble over this landscape often and see shards of ceramics left over from the gold rush, just little corners of them displayed, everywhere partly buried. These fragments of objects were once held, and I think of the people before me all those years ago inside an interior but now embedded inside the landscape.

I create my paintings as an antidote to the world we live in now, to nurture playfulness, not avoidance, but to put lightness on difficult memories and life challenges. Hill End is a place to produce a fertile imagination, as in my childhood.

-Genevieve Carroll, 2024