Celebrating Townsville Exhibition - The Artists

ARTIST STATEMENT

Cazalet has stated, “This work is created largely in pastel. It is one of a series of works intended to expose the feelings, both positive and negative, of women forced by circumstances beyond their control, to leave the security and certainty of their own homes and countries and seek a new life elsewhere.

The work speaks of moving into a new and unknown space; of anxiety, of loss, of the feeling of being stripped bare and sent amongst strangers but also of the curiosity, the hope, and the dream-like awe of one who enters a place of safety and opportunity after living through a nightmare.

This work, like all the works of this series, was inspired by stories told to me by women who had faced this situation for real. These formed part of storytelling workshops I conducted, designed to give refugee and migrant women the chance to share the extraordinary stories of determination and survival that were the otherwise hidden background to their arrival in Australia. For me, these stories evoked my personal history when, as a child, with my family, I was forced to leave India, where I was born, and emigrate to Britain. The trauma of that change lives with me still even though I have benefited considerably from the opportunities it also opened up”.