Artwork information

The mood of Milli Jannides’ painting is guided by books she is reading, notes (visual and written) and a sort of wandering contemplation. Through this mental roaming she translates the emotional conditions of character and event into physical landscapes and environments. During the development of this body of new work, Jannides was reading Fathoms: The World in the Whale by Australian writer Rebecca Giggs – a book about the science of whales, their status as mythical figures, and specters of environmental change, but human entanglement with the natural world. The book quotes Anais Nin’s concept of ‘inward clairvoyance’. In her diaries, Nin records being disarmed and transfixed by images of giant blood cells at the American Museum of Natural History. The outward depiction of something intimate to our beings. Understood in these terms, what might otherwise appear to be an abstracted floral motif, can be understood to have parallels in the unseen geometries of our bodies. The work,

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as is typically the case, is a sensory mix of abstract and figurative forms, guiding and unsettling the viewer’s ability to make sense and arrest the work.