Martin King’s current series of prints and drawings ‘dawn survey #3’ reference the genres of still life and natural history painting. The images are drawn from observation and modified by imagination.
The works are a synthesis of a number of things, human and animal, life and death, beauty and macabre, nature and ‘nature morte’, etc. It is sort of a synthesis of opposites.
The image of the lyre-bird performing, references life, beauty and exuberance. The tail feathers are morphed into skulls, like bookends, alluding to the idea of death and passing.
When these opposites are distilled in the imaginative space, the result is ambiguity and irony, a vexed expression of reality, both tranquil and unsettling
It is a metaphysical reality, a reflection on the nature of, and vital connections that, exist in the world we inhabit.
