Lucid

Emma Kiley
Lucid

Oil on canvas
177 x 126 cm
$4700

There is a threshold where suffering is no longer separate from the body.
Pain arrives as pure presence, with an intensity that sharpens everything it touches. At that threshold, the body stops interpreting and simply becomes sensation.
This work comes from the aftermath of prolonged dissociation following trauma, years in which feeling was muted or absent and the body itself felt unreachable. It centres on the moment of return, when numbness fractures and sensation floods back without permission or pacing.
The dancer is overtaken by it. Movement loses intention. The body is pulled, flooded, almost euphoric. The grass, alive, becomes sensation itself, as though the world has regained texture all at once. Feeling returns with an unbearable precision, sharpened by the magnitude of what has been absent. What returns is both desired and no longer distinct from pain.
The painting does not resolve. It holds the moment the body returns to itself yet cannot remain there.

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Artworks currently on exhibition can be collected from the gallery at 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne VIC 3000 once the exhibition has concluded. Collection is available during gallery hours: Tuesday to Friday, 12–7pm, and Saturday, 12–4pm.

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