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Poetic, magical, sinister and sublime - Miriam Jarrs’ paintings are a world unto themselves. Her dream-like landscapes and forests host a cast of folkloric symbols and characters, each representing part of an autobiographical story that progresses across the different paintings. Naïve, hallucinogenic and individually enchanting, as a group the paintings work like an epic, a labyrinth of micro-narratives for the viewer to explore.
The other-worldliness of her paintings is subtle, indebted to surrealism but with a lighter, slighter touch. Like the first steps of a fairy tale, it is by following the trail of understated visual details that the strange, unsettling quality of this Garden of Eden becomes apparent. Dark is inverted to light; light itself becomes concentrated into orbs that float like speckles of snow, or streams of stars, beyond and between the trees; horizons disintegrate, proportions distort; a visible wind blows the narratives from one painting to another. Throughout, the landscapes are charged with a silent intensity, that half-light and heavy weather of the moment before the storm breaks.
Within this dreamscape, different characters take shape and develop: the horse of lights that appears on the cusp of a looming storm or on the edge of a swamp, lurking in the background like a recurrence in a dream; cyclamen flowers blow from painting to painting like an echo of sexual excitement; white cords bind characters to nature, and the paintings to each other; lakes swollen with the milk of human kindness glow against the night sky. All combine to create a landscape where the artist’s experiences are transformed and sublimated into a personal myth and folklore.
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