Past work and its history

Title:

2009 The Divine Road

Location:

Linton and Kay Fine Art Gallery 299 Railway Road, Subiaco Perth Ph(08) 9388 3300

Date:

2009/09/10

Description:

Norton has been inspired by Dante’s Alegheri’s great epic poem about the journey of life, ‘The Divine Comedy’, which was written by the Florence born poet in the 1300’s. Dante wrote his classic about an imaginative journey he himself took through three distinctive stages of his religious or spiritual life on earth. With the help of his guide Virgil, he tromped through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise (Heaven) whilst still living. The moral of the story seems to be very much about what one can do to become a better person while they are still in the here and now; very much along the lines of Buddhist teachings Norton thought. Norton’s intrigue with Dante’s creative wisdoms had her visually moving up the mountain of Purgatory with her own fantastic renditions of the struggles one has with their own encounters and dealings with the Seven Deadly Sins. As a result of her reading of Dante’s cultural gift, Norton has created a powerful body of art works. “Artists or poets works are often a mirror to the contemporary society they live within, adding a twist to the usual way of seeing every day life situations or images. Artists reply to life as it is for them and of course respond to the work of other artists in a progressive creation and morphing of what ends up as what we call culture”. The three clear sections of work in this exhibition might be seen as a progressive journey through Norton’s own Divine Comedy, starting with the autobiographical subject matter of the:
•    “Oasis of Fire (Sandfire)”,
•    then the swirling renditions of “Purgatory Mountain”,
•    and lastly the most recent works painted from her new studio in the Perth hills, the “Divine Road”, which seems to be a kind of metaphorical paradise.

“… The seeds which are planted when we are in love, are the ones we pass on …
I walk through the garden and marvel at the after taste of her love for the grounds. Southern European clumps of jonquils, ranunculus and daffodils appear amidst the capital letters of blackboys, bottlebrushes and gums. Eccentric natives and shy waterfalls fool me into thinking its winter forever. I know that once you lose love – in a hybrid garden – you stop lifting the bulbs, separating them and spreading them around. Your dreams and visions of somewhere else dry up. Then a magical place is just a thing to upkeep, a place where weeds come too often and that which drinks too much in the summer. And so it becomes a fire forest that dumps its branches in your way instead of dropping its changes into your wanderings. What do we become if the love goes out of a garden? We become a stray cat stealing from Monet’s man made and forgotten invention; his garden, which we now call a sinful environmental shame instead of an inevitable chaotic quantum paradise as life more closely resembles”.