Bizarre Bewilderment by Linh
Before you even enter Paul McDermott’s new art exhibition called The Dark Garden, you are tempted and lured with words on the steps leading into his cavern of creativity. The words are welcoming and witty, cleverly arranged in rhyming couplets and lead the guests from the bright light of day into the dimly lit interior of The Tuxedo Cat. It may take a few seconds for the eyes to adjust but the ears are immediately sensing the atmospheric and soothing sounds courtesy of musician Stu Hunter. Hunter’s soundscape provides the ideal aural accompaniment to McDermott’s visual wonder that consists of paintings, drawings, prints and banners in The Dark Garden.
The Dark Garden begins with an interactive story about the first day at a new school for a young boy named Emile Kirst. He notices something different about the other students and how he is different from them. Emile soon realises he is at a Monster School and at first feels frightened of the other students who all look scary, strange and spooky. However, he soon becomes friends with them. The story is told visually through paintings and drawings along the walls and on the ground. The guests must read the story, which is written in stanzas of rhyming couplets, according to the numbered “pages” found in and around The Dark Garden. Some of the monsters are reminiscent of the ones from Maurice Sendak’s book Where The Wild Things Are and that made the paintings and the story more enjoyable for me.
After reading about Emile Kirst, guests can wander into the next part of The Dark Garden, about a young polar bear’s journey of self-discovery and finding his place in the big wide world. The artwork titled The Ghost Bear was inspired by the increased rate of polar ice caps melting in the Arctic and Knut the polar bear, born in captivity at the Berlin Zoological Garden. As a baby, Knut was rejected by his mother so the zookeepers raised him, and he soon became a media sensation. The Ghost Bear is a visual story with no words and all the images are printed onto large black, vertical panels that weave around in an S-shaped path. The images look ghostly and beautiful, especially on the smooth and silky surface of the black panels lit up by bright overhead lights.
The final destination in The Dark Garden is the screening room where guests can sit and watch McDermott’s two short films that he wrote and directed. The theatre is small and intimate with the two short films The Scree and The Girl Who Swallowed Bees screening continuously, one after the other. The Scree, narrated by the late Ruth Cracknell, tells of how five friends set out together on a boating trip and they land on a mysterious island with fierce and savage flora and fauna. The terrifying beast called the Scree soon attacks them, and only one is brave and fast enough to escape. The second film, narrated by Hugo Weaving, is about a suicidal girl who has only felt pain and misery in her life so she imagines various ways to die. She decides to swallow bees so they can sting her to death from the inside. However, things do not go as planned. Both these films reflect the nature of life and death and the ways humans interact with nature. These themes are present in all of the artwork found in The Dark Garden and can be simultaneously sublime, ugly, fearsome and beautiful.
The Dark Garden art exhibition season has ended at the Adelaide Fringe Festival.
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