May 2021

ARTISTS: Emerging Curator Steph Cibich

AUTHOR – Melanie cooper

 On approaching midnight.

Would it help if I told you?

That I always worried

About time – 

In childhood,

The impossibly long stretch of it

Reaching back and forth

in and out of murky unknowns,

Sometimes suspended

And then superseded 

by the rapid slippage

between this age

And the next…

That rapture,

This wound,

Every breath.

Would it help if I confide? 

That solace in my darkest hours 

I found in the wind -

That random, impartial force

Coming up out of nowhere,

Tossing leaves, branches, and whatever else along

Swirling and heaving,

Blasting through silence

dull and searing ache -

To remind me of 

impermanence, 

interconnectedness

brevity

and gratitude.

Agitating and ambivalent,

Wind forced my attention

Back to the trees -

Silent elders 

Taking root long before my birth,

Familiar and strange

Sprung from the same earth 

I feel lying in my bones.

And still

The pendulum swings,

Steady and rhythmic -

Cosmic and universal

Circular arcs of time and loss,

Infinity and beginning…

Circular and closing in.

Melanie Cooper is a visual artist and art historian working on Kaurna land. She currently serves on the executive committee of the Art History and Curatorship Alumni Network and editorial committees including Cerae: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies and was the first postgraduate representative for the Australian and New Zealand Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. She is a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide where she has lectured in art history and is the state representative for The Art Association of Australia and New Zealand. 

A member of Floating Goose Studios since 2016, Cooper’s studio practice embraces the techniques of painting, textiles and drawing and continues to provide a space for intuitive response and exploration. Inspired by landscape, memory and concepts of identity, her work continues to indulge her love of process, myth, and untold histories. In her work as an art historian, Cooper specialises in the visual art and culture of the eighteenth century, and she has also written on Contemporary art. Her current research is motivated by an enduring interest in representations of mythology and folklore, and a growing fascination for iconoclasm.