OPENING: Friday 4th November 6pm - 9.30pm - get tickets here
OPEN DAILY: 11am - 6pm
Exhibtion by Lucia Sellars
We are born to die; yet, how many times do we die in a
lifetime? Small deaths surround us: a loss, an ending, a
heartbreak, a ‘Petit Mort’, a deep sleep, an accident, a
disenchantment, an achievement, a night. We go through
our lives in a journey between mountains and gullies,
where to reach either provokes the sensation of a small
death inside us, or a rebirth.
The title Swan Songs comes from the ancient belief that
swans sing a beautiful song just before their death for
they were silent all through their lifetime. What is death
though, but a rebirth into the unknown, like a river
meeting the vast sea and not knowing what lies ahead.
As Socrates says in Plato’s Phaedo: ‘… men, because of
their own fear of death, misrepresent the swans and say
that they sing for sorrow, in mourning for their own death.
They do not consider that no bird sings when it is hungry
or cold or has any other trouble; no, not even the
nightingale or the swallow or the hoopoe which are said
to sing in lamentation. I do not belief they sing for grief,
nor do the swans; but since they are Apollo’s birds, I
believe they have prophetic vision, and because they
have foreknowledge of the blessings in the other world
they sing and rejoice on that day more than ever before’.
Perhaps the beautiful swan song can be correlated to the
epiphany that extreme joy and sorrow bring: an
understanding, a letting go; either way a release. These
Swan Songs: these paintings before you represent some
of the small deaths and rebirths I have experienced,
these being either observed from the heightened clarity at
a mountain top or from the deep darkness of profound
gullies.
Lucia Sellars plays with text, fine art and moving image,
as well as being an environmental consultant and a quiet
observer. Early this year Beir Bua Press published her
poetry collection ‘The State of Moving’. Her video-poems
have been screened in the UK and internationally in
Greece, USA, Australia, Ireland and Russia. In April 2022
Lucia curated The Mythos Collective exhibition in Bristol.
You can see more of her work here:
www.luciasellars.org
@luciasellars1.