Sally Picot

Sally Picot is a New Zealander but has had experience being a migrant when she lived in London for 15 years.

She had never heard of the Moon Festival, but she was curious about what it meant to people around her and how it was celebrated. Sally is very open to learning new things and enjoys working with her hands, making art and doing different crafts. She loves creating art from raw materials and will use all kinds of mediums such as clay, fibre, paper, glass, and paints to name a few. Her approach is to choose a medium and start exploring the possibilities to see what she can create.

As an artist, Sally was curious about what other people and cultures felt about the moon when she found out that there was such a thing as the Moon Festival. In the past, she had heard people talking about “The Man in the Moon” but had not delved into the myth of who he was and how he got there. When she was young, her mother used to take her outside to look up at the moon and asked her if she could see him. This, however, gave her the starting point to formulate her own approach to creating her vision of the moon in her art.

The plaque, sitting in front of her, that she created from a glass and plaster mixture and depicts the full moon. It has a face of the man in the moon, shown in the form of a crescent to one side, its craters filling the remaining space. Sally said she really enjoyed molding and preparing the medium, creating her art and seeing the finished product which will hang on one of her walls. The plaque will be left in the unpainted state because Sally wants to depict the coolness of her moon where it is “feminine, a softer, more introspective dreamtime.”