Flying the Flag

My clever girls helped me celebrate the announcement of selection for the South West Showcase by flying my flags of appreciation at the Bunbury Regional Art Galleries last month.

I am not sure if my linen ladies are still flying but they will always fly in my imagination...

Gross Domestic Product

Gross Domestic Product features the blanketed forms of two armless mannequin children. Blanket-stitched into a gymp-suit of plaid and baby pink lambswool the creepy children overwhelm with a weighty sexual perversion aroused in the juxtaposition of suffocated innocence with amputated anonymity.

Positioned to face one another, the irony of silent communication via stitched orrfice invites consideration of the status of the child in societies across the world where playful innocence is either stifled within the cotton-wool wadding of terrified helicopter parents or the opposite and appalling extreme that sees the innocence of thousands of children brutally severed in a meat market of slavery and prostitution brought about by abject poverty and evil opportunism.

Firmly stitched into their destiny, these babies enact a sweet dance in their gestures toward one another - leaning slightly, rear leg adrift; it is as though frozen in playful mid-skip. Suffocated and suspended, the forms are locked together conversing in an eerie animation that unsettles ideas of children and their inherent innocence: what are we doing to our children?

Hanging on a nearby wall is a dissident arm with parrot wingshalf-alighted like an offering of hope in it's imagined escape. Yet it too is captured, suspended and waiting for the audience to survey it's existence and affirm it's purpose with poetic meaning beyond an arm with wings on a wall.

It can fly no more than you or I but nontheless stands as evidence to the concept of hope and the power of an idea to fire the imagination.

Virginia has not given up on art.

She has made an offering: her children, bound and gagged, sacrificed in the temple to the idea of ideas.

With faces bearing the hideous scars of their origin - the truth of existence that we each tear our way into existence in a bloodied pool of secrecy screaming until we are silenced - the babies stand face to face in a symbolic gesture for us to face up to one another, share our scars and begin the dance where we might imagine we could fly.

Virginia Cunningham's debut at the Bunbury Regional Art Galleries was featured in local newspaper the South Western Times in February and set the wheels in motion for her career in the art industry.

Homemaker extraordinaire, Virginia has recently been announced as the winner of the BRAG South West Showcase where she is to exhibit her Spin Cycle installation.