Night & Day (2021)
Polystyrene and acrylic paint
Where is your closest gargoyle?
Gargoyles protect us in this lifetime – they can serve as a gateway to safe places, watching over us with their animalistic features. These sculptures take the forms of a lion and an owl with sun and moon signs attributed to them, symbolising that they protect us constantly – day and night.
Gargoyles are benevolent monsters, so different to the serene angels that watch over cemeteries. Sun and moon are primal, inexhaustible symbols. We’ll never be able to guess at their motives, but we welcome their light and warmth.
About the Artist
Priscilla Bourne lives on Dharug and Gundungurra Country in the Blue Mountains and is a founding member of Our Neon Foe artist studios and project space. She attained her Masters in Visual Arts from Sydney College of the Arts with an exchange at Alfred University NY. Priscilla’s work is concerned with universal connections and the importance of creatively processing objects and beings that come into her orbit. She has exhibited with Ray Hughes Gallery, Gaffa Gallery, Mori Gallery, New Standard Gallery, No Show at Carriageworks, and she has created collaborative public artworks for the City of Sydney.
Transcription
So my name is Priscilla Bourne and I'm a artist that works with a whole variety of materials. I really focus on things that are gestural and creative and I really push to see things in materials and the world that aren't necessarily there. So I love to capture the imagination within different materials.
Yeah, so my work is called Night & Day. They're two large sculptures made out of polystyrene and they take on the metaphors of gargoyles protecting day and night of beings that would be considered gargoyles. My sculptures are large polystyrene artworks that are being carved with the angle grinder and they're very animalistic, with no personality to them that's human, but of another world, because their representative of Gargoyles and they are painted to show the texture that the angle grinder has made to create the works.
So this work was inspired by seeing a powerful owl one night when we were walking near my house, and just the size of the owl and it's presence really struck me and I knew that I was going to do two beings. So the owl really came to me immediately as a representation and then you know who doesn't love a lion? so the lion with the face of the sun came as a mimicking, as a, a pairing to the owl. These works are for the HIDDEN exhibition because Gargoyles like they guard us through this life and the next life, and HIDDEN, being a grave site, you know, and being very close to the next world, are these these emblems and these images and characters are creative through to this world and the next world so I think they're perfect.
When my friends and I were trying to find the closest gargoyle and I remember getting a phone call and and I have found my [inaudible] my house, and I really it, really resonated with me that, you know, there are these mythical like characters and beings out there, chapped in stone generally, that could be guardians of lives in and around the city and especially in a cemetery. So I hope people take away that they are protected by forms that are transforming into like artworks that look after us gargoyles and they protect us through this life and the next life.
And you know, the more gargoyles s that you have around, the more safe passage you have through this world in an imaginative way and in a creative way. So I hope people take away from these gargoyles a sense of reassurance to creativity protecting us. Okay, thanks.