On March 11th my exhibition “Blue: the way it was” opened in the gallery SALA i_10, Centro Joaquín Roncal, Zaragoza, Spain. The exhibition is both painting and multimedia. The exhibition is a series of work done between 2018 and 2020.  The work is a series of New Zealand glacier landscapes, specifically from the region of the Southern Alps in NZ, which is a part of NZ that has special memories for me. I chose to work only in a range of blue tones for these paintings, because it expresses my nostalgia for the land, having lived away for 30 years. Through this work I reflect my feelings for the land, and also my concern over what the glaciers are revealing about climatic change. The work also explores my memory of family and places I spent time in when growing up in NZ. In the exhibition I include 3 videos created as part of the process of painting these places, using old family films to help try and recall the past. The resulting work shows how, although I try to capture the forms that flash by on the film, I never manage to, and the painting is in fact full of overlapping lines and shapes expressing change and movement. In time it is just the energy I recall. One of the videos “Distantly connected II” is a conversation I had with my mother by Skype during the Confinement because of COVID 19. In that conversation my mother reads poems she wrote in the years my parents spent living in Middlemarch, New Zealand.

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Catálogo Sarah Shackleton