Waratah Lamps
2024
The Waratah Lamps give presence and reverence through light, moving through the abstracted petals of the waratah and out into the world, pollinated by your gaze and imagination.
The Waratah plays a central role in the Warawana mythologies. It symbolises the holding shape that all the matter of the planet is and has always been held within. The flower and all pollinating vessels represent the threshold between the mythic (invisible) plain and this one. Pollination is considered an important active form of the ongoing weaving of the planets’ patterns.
The holding shape is the waratah, the gatherer. It is a vessel, a container, a place. You and I live in this shape, so I can’t tell the story from outside it. We are the waratah; we are, in this moment, the form that takes hold.
We don’t just happen to be here at the same time; we exist together, in a complex interdependency, entangled with each other. It’s impossible to separate any form of life from any other, since they all hold each other.
We are the waratah.We hold and are held by this gathering-together.
Excerpt from ‘A Compendium of the Oscillocene’
Open edition
Glass, brass, silicon, lighting
1100 x 240⌀ (pendant)
1100 x 300⌀ (floor)
Made with Hannah Gason and Tom Rowney during ‘designer in residence’ at Canberra Glassworks 2024
From MYTHICA IGNOTA Artefacts of the Oscillocene and Warawana Mythologies
Designing Mythology is a questioning and proposal for old ways / new to exist as humans, using the process of 'mything' to reorientate back towards the planet, and recalibrate our value systems by dismantling the current shadow metaphors of the Western-colonial worldview. It proposes the restorying of scientific perspectives to offer a cosmology that includes humans as part of the living world whilst simultaneously removing us from the centre. Thus a recognition and return, via a circuitous route, to the worldviews, deep connection and sustainment of the first peoples of our planet.
Photographer Pew Pew Studio, Brenton McGeachie courtesy of Canberra Glassworks and designer images
Acquisition inquiries via Sophie Gannon Gallery
