Image: Jemima WYMAN Flourish 9 2020, hand-cut digital photographs on paper, 132 h x 101.5 cm. Mackay Regional Council Art Collection. Purchased 2020.
This work is comprised of hand-cut digital photographs on black paper and measures 132 centimetres high by 101.5 centimetres wide. The work is displayed in a black frame.
In the centre of this work there is an image of a large yellow, orange and brown moth resting with its wings outstretched, 10 centimetres in diameter, displaying the distinctive circular markings on its upper and lower wings employed by insects to act as a deterrent to predators.
Surrounding the outside of the moth are hand-cut photographs which mirror each other on the left- and right-hand side of the work created by a virtual line that runs from top to bottom down the centre of the work. This is known in nature as a line of symmetry or mirror symmetry and most commonly found in a set of butterfly wings. This creates a precision and a balance to the work as a whole.
Starting in the top left-hand corner and moving to the right are a small group of figures dressed in black Plague Doctor costumes with bird-like beak masks similar to that of a crow. Beside this group of figures and moving to the right are insects with yellow and black striped wings. Further to the right, and at the very top of the work, in the centre are hand-cut images of orange coral.
Beneath the coral is a group of four figures wearing white theatre masks. Underneath the row of figures and insects, starting back on the far-left hand side is an orange chameleon perched on a branch, beside a cartoonish mask of an orange frog with large, bulging eyes. Natural organic forms concentrate around these figures with stacked orange and brown fungi, toadstool mushrooms, snakes, butterflies, birds, orange dahlias, sunflowers and yellow cornflowers all clamouring for space amongst a cast of characters made up of masked protestors, performers in face paint, jesters, women clothed in black shrouds of transparent material, another woman crouching covered in leopard print body paint and slogans on banners featuring the words, Happy May Day, Wash Ur Hands and The Thugs have been arrested! amongst others.
This dense arrangement of imagery, combined with its mirrored symmetry, creates a striking kaleidoscopic effect.
The palette used uniformly throughout this work is black, yellow and orange echoing Aposematism, or ‘warning’ colouration found in nature, and is employed to signal to predators’ toxicity and danger. The combination of yellow and black, or orange and black alternating in shape and colour signals an alert to threat, the striking patterns noting danger and a motif Wyman returns to throughout this series.
Since 2008 Wyman has compiled a digital archive of protest images called the MAS-archive (an acronym for Masks, Aposematism, and Signage). It includes thousands of photographs from global demonstrations-covering movements like Occupy, the Arab Spring and the Yellow Vests movement in France, where demonstrators mobilised across the country in late 2018, wearing high visibility fluorescent yellow vests to identify with their shared cause. Here Wyman juxtaposes protesters’ use of aposematism with the same found in the natural world acting as much as a defence tactic as a visual strategy to reorientate from the individual to the collective.