In September 2007 I traveled to New Caledonia, an island nation between Australia and Fiji, for an art residency with two aboriginal sculptors from Taiwan. The theme of the residency was the ancient Austronesian migrations south from China across the Pacific and Indian Oceans that reached Madagascar to the west, Easter Island to the east, and New Zealand to the south.
My work from the residency centers on the theme of migration—not only the sea-trails of thousands of years ago, but also the ways migration manifests in contemporary life when we move to and away from places, relationships, and stages of life.
These paintings are part of a poem-painting series called “Migration”. These poems and paintings were posted on the web by the Center on Contemporary Art (CoCA) and can be viewed here.
A selection from “Migration”:
the horizon line congeals
from a 1000-mile migration,
the sea opens in a wake
of widening water trails,
the ocean loam plowed open
by a bone hook
and a stone blade,
chickens and taro
in the holds of hollowed palms,
outrigger canoes with 3-edged sails:
thatch houses
broadcast south
along archipelagos
pioneered by
wedge-winged birds
beating into
distance and return,
beyond the continents
of human ken—
islands rise
from Pacific blue
like amphibians,
low and long,
with teeth raised into clouds
and tails that moult
from green to blue,
lipped with shimmers of sand
and wreathed in tropic flowers—
