volume 14, number 1, 2019

About the cover artwork

Anita Lever, It is real, 2019, watercolour paper, fabric, photo collage, spraypaint, acrylic paint, stitching, found object, 420×300mm.

Artist statement

Prelude to ‘The gathering’ series, April 2019, Arteles artist residency, Finland.

April became the month when time went out of time, when the silver birch trees and the frozen lake invited me to reshape my inner emotional landscape through call and response. 

My creative process reflected the ever-changing colours of the fields, the forest stories and the enchanted lake as they woke from the long winter to summon in the call of early spring. The cool grays of the forest became white with the late fall of snow, the trees over the fields turned rusty red, and the cool white of the lake mellowed into warm blues and yellows of budding pussy willows along their banks. 

The changing colours and the outlines of the natural environment I witnessed daily became my brush and palette as I grew the work through installation, drawing, video and performance. The ‘Songs of sorrow’ series, the ‘Into red’ lament in the woods, the contours of trees as I rubbed their tall secrets onto fine tracing paper, all whispered their stories to remind me to care for them, to care for myself.

Rituals of dancing with sticks, meditative walking of the sacred stone circle, the healing power of sauna and snow all collaborated to remind me that life is fragile and precarious, and if you slow it down, you will witness a depth of such richness that is a true awakening. It is real.

About the artist

  • BFA, MArtAdmin, MA ATh, AThR

    Anita is an artist and art therapist. She is also a collaborator and co-author in art, storytelling and performance as well as an educator within the Master of Art Therapy degree, Western Sydney University. In 2018, she designed and established an open-studio art therapy environment for a new private mental health hospital in Sydney, where she facilitates daily creative interactions for residential participants. In April 2019, Anita was selected for and experienced the inaugural New Course artist’s residency at Arteles, in Finland, where she established an ongoing creative collaboration with the facilitator Dr Margi Brown Ash, from which grew the arts-based project ‘The gathering’.