Monica Levy is an Australian artist of French/German Jewish heritage living between Berlin, Germany and Australia.
She works from a space of diasporic intersectionality employing site-specific, mixed media and painterly practice.
Her work reflects practice-based art research, this embodied practice rejects the separation of body and mind and values intuition, sensation and physical experience equally with intellectual analysis.
“Gold Dust” is part of a body of work that reflected a period of personal transition and social concern from 2016-2018 in Berlin. Coming to terms with her own background while facing the influx of immigrants and the response in her chosen home.
The omnipresent sense of estrangement and anxiety of a nuero-divergent, Jewish woman in a political environment of social manipulation and fear of the “other” is transformed in the work to possibility of harmony and delicate beauty.
Just as early waves of “foreigners” into Australia came to mine Gold from the land, and every wave that has come since, has change and added to the culture and brings a possibility of understanding and growth.
The Australian Indigenous cultures left paintings, maps and stories to guide the next generations.
Levy says “With no-one to guide us in these times I turn to what I know, beauty and harmony... Internal maps based on history and intuition”
