FOYER SPACE
SHAKING THE HIDDEN HAND
CARMEL SEYMOUR
The human experience of the supernatural began when we were faced with the peculiarities of the everyday natural world. Pre organised religion, a sky full of glowing green auroras or a pareidolic representation in a rock face, was enough to invoke a great spirit in anyone. In searching for explanations of these feelings of wonder and awe our predecessors created our earliest pagan and magical traditions. This work re-imagines our natural/magical relationship placing the body in direct contact with an overwhelming experience of nature, physically and emotionally. It attempts to reconnect with the emotion of wonder that allowed magical possibilities and posed supernatural questions, while demonstrating the absurd routes we often travel to experience the divine.
Seymour graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts with first class honours in 2009. Her second solo exhibition at Helen Gory Galerie opens in May 2012. Her work has been curated into a number of group shows including at RMIT Gallery, C3 Contemporary Art Space and Paradise Hills. Seymour was the recipient of both the Rosemary Ricker Award and George Hicks Award, 2009 and a finalist in the Substation Contemporary Art Award, 2011. She is a recent recipient of an Australia Council ArtStart Grant. Seymour was awarded a SimRes residency in Reykjavik, Iceland in 2010. She returned to Iceland in 2011 to undertake a further residency at The Hrisey Old School Arthouse on a remote island in the north of the country. In 2012 Carmel will undertake a residency at the SIM house in Berlin.
