Contemporary Australia: Women

170 One dances (no. 2) 2003 Lambda print on paper 130 x 127cm Gift of the artist through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2005 Collection: Queensland Art Gallery Opposite A wake (details) 2011 Mixed media installation 15 figures: installed dimensions variable Finally, the title: A wake. Think of what the word means in the context of saying farewell to someone at the end of their life: it asserts the continuation of wakefulness, even watchfulness, for those of us who remain behind to remember the dead. To be awake to their memory is our duty, as it is the only way left to give life to those who are departed. Her daughter is the fugitive presence that marks Wright’s life and her art: her absence is everywhere — and nowhere. Judith Wright is completely aware that in European fable a woman presided over the birth of images. Shades, an old word for the departed, suggest that the dead persist in our memories and lives as fleeting shadows: we glimpse them only out of the corner of our eye. And we give them due ceremony. Julie Ewington and beautiful objects collected Judith Wright, rather than the other way round, as objects with a rich past tend to do. For, serendipitously, when she came to make A wake she found she already had many of the materials she needed, so that she now could, as the mother-impresario, present a celebratory event to remember her daughter and give her the appropriate last rites. Despite the imposing presence of the performers in Awake , their shadows are their better selves. Wright says it was ‘the power of the shadow to conjure absence’ that directed her to make A wake . Note, too, that Wright never represents her daughter: she cannot — she is no longer here. Rather, she conjures her presence through meditating on her absence, on her shadow across Wright’s life. This reminds us that the ancient Greeks associated shadows with a person’s soul, a ‘living double, a surrogate’, as the art historian Victor Stoichita eloquently puts it in his beautiful exposition of the importance of shadows in the strand of Western art that is magical, rather than naturalistic, in its origins. 7 The same holds true of Wright’s silent energetic musicians: the shadows of these performers is the soul of their music.