Rosslynd Piggott
Australia b.1958

Night and mirrors 1999–2000
Oil, silver and palladium relief, pearl on linen
Purchased 2000. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant

Rosslynd Piggott has found many ways to explore and amplify the intangible over the course of her artistic career. She describes her paintings as a field of experience ‘the observer may fully enter, breathe and flow through’.

Night and mirrors 1999–2000 traces the shadowy silhouette of a pine tree against the night sky in which a tiny pearl gleams like a distant moon. This is a painting about spending time with the unseen – feeling the companionable presence of a single tree and opening ourselves to the greater mysteries of the night sky. Panels of silver and palladium leaf flank this expansive image, like an altar.

Piggott speaks of ‘making works that offer a kind of sanctuary’, and of seeking remedy for ‘a lack of connection with the natural realm, a shortage of experience that may encourage us to be kinder and more humble to each other and to our planet’. The expansive, subtly layered fields of colour she creates provide an opportunity for us to fuse with the ‘particle space and vice-versa, like a type of breathing’.