Donna Lougher

Diaspore - Artist Statement

Referencing compositions from Andy Warhol’s Space Fruit: Still Life screen print series that he created in 1979, comes the development of Lougher’s latest series of plein air paintings, titled ‘Diaspore’ - an experimentation with one of the most philosophical genre in figurative painting – the still life. Still life’s by their very nature are choreographed compositions. And like the moon landing 1969 which made headlines around the world yet abruptly ended in 1972, now the Artemis 1 moon mission arises yet again for a new era in space exploration.

Lougher began to plant seeds in her kitchen 2021, and along with gifts from friends, like the first fruit from a friend’s new orange tree, or a swollen bag of lemons given to her, this somehow concretised into an art form, an object, about the everyday.

Diaspore –botany, is from the Greek diaspora – meaning scattering, a co-evolution even, between birds and flowering plants in respect of pollination and dispersal of the fruits / seeds.

For Lougher a synergy formed between her sense of grief for the loss of her late partner - and dispersing his ashes at the base of the semi-arid mountainous range Ikara Wilpena, (a sacred place) and the connection with her immediate surrounds – becoming the pivotal painting in the series of new works titled ‘The Organ Pipes’ – and her attention to its impeding threat of further development. If we abandon nature and the elements that form it, then we are destroying humanity she writes. And as Nolan stated, ‘as death is inevitable, the only option to you is one of dignity or some kind of beauty’.

There is a fundamental repetition in Donna’s work, in which all leads up to the mountain presence. Through her painterly style, the rhythmic and successive lines which are shared in music, dance, architecture and poetry produce an overall harmonious effect. The balance between light and dark sits for her upon the mid tone of the ultramarine blue and white coloured ground.

The dark grey contour lines which define shapes and colour, map our own body’s atoms made of carbon. The organic material beneath like the human skin or flesh becomes a sequence of golden hexagon chains that are packed together. The hexagon after all, allows bees to pack the most cells into the smallest space.
- Donna Lougher