Exodus 7

‘Exodus 7’ represents the sky as pictorial space literally and metaphorically sustaining and bearing witness to an event. The title, and the apparent suggestion of shared movement with a common purpose, points to notions of abandonment, escape and migration - within a scene that suggests optimism as much as it does a sense of a foreboding. Any narratives suggested in this work are tied to the broader subject matter of an allegorical series of paintings by the artist, entitled “Witness: The Sky is Called”. Although aspects of the artist’s own identity, cultural heritage and stories are incorporated, the intention is to offer a body of work to viewers that acts as a stage to explore their own experience and understandings. Co-existing relations and tension such as those between the symbolic and the literal, balance and contrast, reality and imagination, individuality and conformance, and complexity and simplicity, all play a part in the presented metaphors that viewers are invited to explore.