Art has played a significant part in our lives since Phillip and I were young adults. When our four children were little we would spend many Sundays in the Art Gallery of NSW. Creation landscape: Man and the spheres, a triptych by William Robinson, used to hang in the foyer. Our four young ones liked to view the swirling landscapes upside down by lining up in front with their backs to the paintings and peering through their legs. On one visit, the then gallery director, Edmund Capon, joined them. It was a joyful moment in which our children taught us to look at the world in a new way.
This is how art, in all its guises, challenges us. This issue’s contributors, like those four little children, are challenging us to see art (whether personal or public) in a new way and to see how that art has resonated with them.
This issue of Burrow is a little like an art gallery or perhaps a much cherished home. I invite you to take a leisurely stroll through the works here. You will discover family portraits, performances and installations, landscapes and sculptures as well as more abstract and experimental pieces.
Some of our contributing poets have provided photographic images or links to works that have provoked their writing. Some have incorporated visual images into the work itself. Others have let their poems stand on their own. You probably won’t need to be upside down to read any of them, but I am certain that some of these poems will surprise you and challenge you to view things in a new way.
Jillian Hall
Old Water Rat Publishing 