Whorls
Exhibited with BA Projects at Melbourne Art Fair, 2025
Presented to Melbourne Art Fair VIP Studio Visits
Whorls are a series of beadings that are based on Camille’s first year of experiencing new life.
Portal, 2025
22cm x 36cm
Glass beads, thread
Portal is a meditation on the structures that can allow us to move through suffering. After giving birth in 2024, Camille experienced a significant period of mental disquiet. During this time, she communicated with her analyst via a series of text messages. These messages functioned as temporary portals built with words; exit points from moments of psychic pain. A phrase from these exchanges has been beaded into the work.
Indefinite Pitch, 2025
22cm, x 36cm
Glass beads, threads
Indefinite Pitch is a nod to the ways in which art and music can articulate experiences that lie beyond words. Following the birth of her child, Camille came into contact with a feeling of pure and real life; a raw feeling usually veiled by the structures of the everyday. The effect of this contact felt similar to how Krzysztof Penderecki wrote the score Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. Penderecki used graphic symbols in his composition to instruct the orchestra to make sounds that sit beyond classical Western music notation. This method symbolised for Camille how some feelings cannot be expressed in conventional ways of communicating. A fragment of Penderecki’s score has been beaded into the work.
Whorl, 2025
22.5cm x 36cm
Glass beads, thread
After giving birth and in the first year of having a baby, the whorl became a visual motif for Camille’s experience of new life. The distinct shape appeared: in her child’s hair and fingerprints, in the atmosphere, in shells and in the way people construct stories. It also became a symbol of the psyche, the gathering of existential thoughts and feelings around the unfathomable truth of her child. During the end of 2024, Camille and her family found themselves in the arms of Typhoon Kong-Rey, a super typhoon that brushed over Taiwan. This event offered a moment where the whorl appeared: internal and external landscapes converged and mirrored one another. Embedded in Whorl are the geographic coordinates that mark the place in which they encountered the typhoon, and the mathematical equation for a whorl.