Air

‘My mind and senses belong to both micro and macro space, to its furthest imaginable realms’, says Piggott. The field of experience she creates in her paintings is somewhere ‘the observer may fully enter, breathe and flow through’. 3 Piggott’s painting Night and mirrors 1999–2000 traces the shadowy silhouette of a pine tree against the night sky in which a tiny pearl gleams like a distant moon. This is very much a painting about spending time with the unseen, feeling the companionable presence of a tree and opening ourselves to the greater mysteries of the night sky. Panels of silver and palladium leaf flank this expansive image, like an altar. Piggott speaks of ‘making works that offer a kind of sanctuary . . . in contrast to a world that is increasingly and senselessly over-wired’, and of seeking remedy for ‘a lack of connection with the natural realm, a shortage of experience that may encourage us to be kinder and more humble to each other and to our planet’. In the expansive, subtly layered fields of colour she creates within her paintings, Piggott seeks to create an opportunity for exchange where the viewer may fuse with the ‘particle space and vice‑versa like a type of breathing’. 4 GB 3 Rosslynd Piggott interviewed by Peter McKay, ‘An Interview with Rosslynd Piggott’, Courage and Beauty: The James C Sourris Collection , Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2022, p.98. 4 Piggott in McKay. (above and opposite) Rosslynd Piggott / Night and mirrors 1999–2000 116 Shared