You must never lose heart in your love, my love

Artists across Australia were invited to create a piece of artwork for Skillset's Flannery Centre that responded to the following statement: 

Humanity is now living in ways which outstrip the capacity to provide an equitable, healthy lifestyle for future generations.

With 7 billion people a number of planetary boundaries have been reached which will drive fundamental changes to the way we live and work.

You must never lose heart in your love, my love began in the patterned pieces of linoleum left over from a series of works completed in 2011. I had thought completing these works would signify a departure from my long fascination with the domestic realm and the things we leave behind. So I never rolled up the left over linoleum. Instead these fragments remained on the studio floor. Once back underfoot they shifted and slipped with my everyday life. Patterns crawled across the floor to meet new patterns and fresh conversations were started. 

Linoleum is the perfect medium to explore current dilemmas facing humanity. When first invented it allowed for highly decorative flooring to be produced affordably, making elaborately patterned decor accessible to the everyday home. Originally composed of the perfect mix of linseed oil, cork dust, wood flour, tree resins, ground limestone and pigment, linoleum was a completely natural material. As the industry evolved this durable floor covering took on different forms and danced with more dangerous ingredients like asbestos, adding a once natural product to the long list of potentially harmful visitors we have welcomed into our workplaces and everyday lives.

In today’s world this densely patterned linoleum is outdated. On one hand it can be viewed as rubbish. On the other hand it can be a material imbued with memory, a material that allows us to re-imagine the past in the present. You must never lose heart in your love, my love is a gentle reminder that answers often grow in the places where life puts us down. This quiet approach draws its strength from the resilience and adaptability of the human race. It looks to the everyday lives of the seven billion people living on our planet to not only find the answers we need to live equitably and healthily, but to drive these changes in a way that is sustainable and accessible to all.