What is it that invites us to love? Is it an invisible filament wrapping around and around, cocooning us with its energy? Perhaps it is a holographic flicker of familiarity, or simply a previously unknown glimpse of ourselves.
Once in a while we see something that shoots straight into our hearts and stays there. So it was for me with a piece of art that I recently viewed at the Art Gallery of South Australia.
For those who might be traveling to South Australia, the Art Gallery SA is well worth a look. It is a gem of a gallery. Recently they closed the main areas for a traveling exhibition of Impressionist work. During the exhibition, they used the time to reimagine their own future display of treasured works. The five main areas have now been rehung with their own collection, to great advantage. As with most things in Adelaide, the gallery is evolving and becoming its better self.
After we had viewed the main galleries we entered one of the smaller galleries and it was there I was smitten. I can’t remember if I gasped or not, but if I didn’t I should have! I know I stopped for a couple of seconds to try to take in what I was seeing. The object of my initial shock, and immediate attraction, drew me in. Was it real? Was it fake? What was it there to tell?
Thirty five years ago in the Adelaide Zoo, a baby giraffe died. It was kept in the freezer of the Queen Victoria Museum in Launceston, Tasmania, until an artist, jeweller, and taxidermist named Julia deVille discovered it seven years ago.
Julia deVille commissioned another artist, Kate Rhode, to create the ‘vitrine’ (glass display case) that holds her sensitively posed and adorned creature. All of the jewellery was created using precious metals and jewels especially for this purpose. Perhaps more than most of the art I have seen in my life, this impacted me for its sensitive execution, and thoughtful inspiration. Julia deVille’s question to the world is:
‘why do we divide animals into arbitrary categories such as food, pets, pests, entertainment, endangered and protected species?’
To my thinking, this gorgeous creature would have perished to dust, or lay forever in a cold dark freezer with no one knowing it had ever existed. Instead, it has a new life. It was always one of nature’s works of art, but now it is also a human work of art.
Always in my heart, whenever I want to visit.
The work is titled ‘Mother is My Monarch’ and these words accompany it:
Mother is My Monarch,
She is the folds of the universe in which I lie and all becomes still
Truth and Royalty
Reverence and the Revered
Feline Lepidoptera*
Mother Monarch
I hail thee
(*Lepidoptera refers to an order of insects including butterflies)
