Afternoon of the Harpies promises, or perhaps threatens, to be an exhibition of phantasmagoria, fantastical creatures, insect angels, vessels for incarnation, carpets and luminescent fish-trap spaceships by two of the Canberra region's most provocative and adventurous artists.
Sculptor Stephen Harrison and poet, photographer and artist Judith Nangala Crispin have long explored the darker reaches of human and animal experience.
Now they have turned to the classics in an enigmatic collaboration inspired by the Harpyiai, the Harpies of Homeric poetry and Greek mythology, personifications of catastrophic winds, hurricanes and violent storms. Half human and half bird, these winged creatures symbolised unheeded prophecies and elemental forces defending animals and birds against human hubris.
The appearance of a Harpy was said to herald famine, war, pestilence or the fall of indifferent angels. Today, the artists suggest, we face different but equally unsettling omens, the consequences of our betrayal of nature, our greed and our failure to heed the warnings carried on the wind, or in the silence left by disappearing insects. Yet, they insist "we celebrate the light that remains."
Working across photography, sculpture and installation, the pair have blended distinctive photographic processes with painterly and sculptural forms to explore mortality, the unseen and the mysterious relationships between humans, the natural world and whatever may lie beyond.