FLAVELL
Horn of the Moon - 13 Goddesses (there are no museums at the end of the world)
They used their dreams, their slips of tongue, their fantasies . . . as maps or signposts for a country, which lay just beyond, or alongside, or within the landscape, they could see and touch.¹
- Doris Lessing
Susan Flavell has been dreaming about the end of the world since 1984. She says, “When I dream or am in that space between sleep and awake, I am overwhelmed and overpowered by a continuous stream of images both dark and hilarious”. Flavell’s work has long materialised as a chaotic melding of forms like an unfolding game of exquisite corpse. In this exhibition, hallucinatory visions are brought to life on an epic scale. Like a shelter housing mythical beasts and animate detritus, washed up on an apocalyptic tide, the ambitious multi-gallery installation is a beautiful and frightening carnival: a day of the dead procession, a celebration, a call to arms. Haunted by visions of environmental disaster in both her dream and waking states, Susan Flavell employs magical thinking as a political strategy against climate apocalypse. Yet, this is no miserable trek into dystopia, instead it is a darkly funny wonderland of strange treasures that sits somewhere between the real ground of Wadjuk boodja and a slippery, turbulent dreamscape.
In my dream, a glowing cord connects me, umbilical-like, to the tree – we each have a swirling vortex of light in our mid-section from which the tendrils emerge and unite. When the bulldozer topples the giant Tuart, I wake in a panic feeling torn apart. It’s January 2017 and the community I share with Susan Flavell is reeling from the violent and rapid clearing of virgin bushland to make way for the Roe8 development. Having been arrested for a ‘lock-on’ action at the very start of the protest movement, Flavell has been forced to stay away from the site under a Move On Order.
As a local resident and passionate environmental activist, the fight to save the Beeliar Wetlands in part inspired Susan Flavell’s Horn of the Moon exhibition at the John Curtin Gallery, central to which was Susan’s first Goddess ‘Kali’. In Hindu tradition, Kali symbolises Mother Nature. She is the Goddess of destruction and change, the manifestation of pure female cosmic energy and the mother of all living beings. Flavell’s terrifying incarnation of Kali loomed over the gallery, her horned, mouthless face covered in eyes with rows of breasts cascading above a flowering, indeterminate genitalia. The work recalls Kali’s legend: to destroy evil in order to defend the innocent. With a childhood spent moving across the world, from Central America to the UK, the trauma of Roe8 had the unexpected outcome of allowing Flavell a sense of belonging for the first time in her life, anchoring her to the environment and community where she lives and works.
Over the past seven years, Flavell has gone on to create another twelve ‘Goddesses’ that represent themes such as love, fire, flood, plants, drought and hope, brought together for the first time at the John Curtin Gallery. Founded on story-telling practices, Flavell’s artwork reveals notions of the fantastic, the monstrous and the mythical. Driven by a fundamental commitment to the use of recycled materials, Flavell’s work interrogates accepted hierarchies of material value. Everything in the exhibition, wherever possible, is recycled. Previous works have been modified and reworked and the vast majority of the materials have been recycled, found, gifted or second hand. The result is a sensual collage of objects whose meanings push and pull between the known and strange, creating their own songs and rhythms. This strange procession is also an ending: Flavell does not want to take back a single object at the conclusion of the exhibition. All that is not claimed by others will be recycled or abandoned if needs must, making way for new dreams and futures.
Lia McKnight
¹ Doris Lessing, 1969, The Four-Gated City, London : MacGibbon & Kee, p. 413.
Susan Flavell, Spirit Animal Extinction Bird, Bear, Elephant, 2021, recycled, found, gifted or second hand materials. Photograph by Sharon Baker.