White Swan Events

The delicate ecosystems of an ancient land and people have been consumed through colonial mythology and industrialisation. I consider the absurd and magical currents of circular time in a land once thought to be a Terra Nullius, where White Swan Events have taken place in a Black Swan country. Despite the destruction, an ancient voice may be heard within every crevice of this land singing us forward. 
The Swan puppet was created in 2010. I hand made the paper by recycling old cotton sheets and towels. The structure is supported with bamboo; kangaroo leather; recycled saddlery and metal scrap. At the time I was studying in Scotland and reflecting on the nature of Swans protected by the Crown in the UK. 
Aristotle referred to the Swan’s arrow like head as 'a spear pointing to dreamier depths, a creature that inhabits the ‘other’ world, the spiritual world with rights of passage to the land of life where it lives harmoniously amongst the four elements'. 
In Australia the Swan Puppet became a colonial abstraction, a comment on the uncanny and mythical narratives associated with Swans. Reflecting on the European curiosity that ensued over Indigenous Black Swans in Australia, ‘discovered’ by a Dutchman in the C17th, I query the unfair association of 'Black Swans' as bad omens through Western perception, with even the Crowning virus of 2020 being labelled a ‘Black Swan Event’. This terminology continues to be used to predict the 'unseen' but 'probable', driving the 'myth' of the 'unknown' and the 'other'. Living in Australia I consider the many White Swan Events that have taken place in a Black Swan country, the omens of colonisation that have reaped havoc in an ancient Indigenous landscape that was a place of spiritual and ecological reciprocity before the White Swans arrived by sea. I reflect on Australian Indigenous peoples, land and fauna that have not been protected by the Crown but subjected to the misaligned judgements of colonial perspectives and structures. 
Depicted within an abandoned industrial context within Sydney cove, in a place that was considered to be a sacred Indigenous site, the clinical nakedness of these truths unravel through time as nature re-claims it's territory, and ancient narratives of the past surface to be heard.