Celebration of the palms, Darwin

Celebration of the palms (1976–78) illuminates a central theme in Wendy Stavrianos’ highly autobiographical oeuvre – the synergies between inner experience and the external world of nature.

Living in Darwin in 1974, Stavrianos witnessed the ferocity of Cyclone Tracy and the ‘bizarre climate’ of its aftermath. During this time, she found that the conventions governing her roles as both headmaster’s wife and artist had become loosened. Nature dominated the Darwin environment and she increasingly connected its power with female agency and her new sense of autonomy. She explains that making art ‘...became a necessity. I was seeing images pour out of a very long period of suppression… The freedom to be who I was inside, not what I was expected to be.’

This work, which combines painting, drawing and sculpture, is Stavrianos’ response to the intense natural forces at play around her, and the sense of freedom she felt in a community that had lost its usual coordinates. She depicts a surreal scene where plants and bodies merge; women’s torsos are subsumed by abundant flora, and vegetal forms in turn echo the female anatomy, suggesting a correlation between the landscape and generative female energy. Amplifying the work’s fecund power is the sculpted canvas substrate, which pushes muscular tree trunks and curling leaves into three dimensions. The artist describes her works of this period as like ‘giant diaries recording, internally and externally, what was a landscape of incredible beauty, but also a landscape of terror’.