Hazards

When I was a girl, I stayed in a cabin in the Freycinet National Park, Tasmania. I spent my days running over the Hazards, playing imaginary games with my friends – a memory that has remained close to my heart as it encapsulated the joy of boundless energy. I recently was diagnosed with dyslexia and have been thinking about my childhood in the context of the challenges I faced with reading, spelling, and learning and the loss of youthful joyfulness. Text become mountains and at times, I struggled to distinguish individual words on the page, as they become jumbles of lines and marks. This painting is part of a series titled Mountain Out Of Words and is a visual representation of the on going struggle many dyslexic people experience day-to-day. It also is the story of the Hazards and features passages telling snippets of the many layered narrative of the Freycinet National Park, including the history of Wineglass Bay, fauna, flora, geology, and pays homage to the indigenous Toorernomairremener people. The granite mountains reach up over the landscape connecting the elements air, water and earth with the spirit of Tasmania.