Echoes of courage V

Light of Midnight: Echoes of Courage V

Narrative collages on laser-carved wood

28 x 24 × 28cm

This work responds to the quiet tension that exists in moments of transition, the space between summer and autumn, noise and stillness, presence and absence.

It began from a feeling I have struggled to name since moving to Australia: existing in two places at once. Building a life here while carrying home elsewhere. Feeling physically present but emotionally divided. The distance becomes heavier when home is in pain, watching war, uncertainty, and loss unfold in Iran while continuing ordinary life on the other side of the world.

Through storytelling and the interplay of light and shadow, this work explores that emotional contradiction.

Light becomes both material and metaphor: something temporary, moving, impossible to hold. Like memory, like belonging, like home. Shadows stretch and shift, revealing fragments rather than complete narratives.

The work asks what emerges when urgency quiets and attention turns inward. What stories surface in silence? What parts of ourselves appear only in darkness?

Drawing from personal memories and the experience of migration, this piece reflects on the feeling of carrying home as something portable yet unreachable, a place built from language, objects, people, grief, and imagination.

Rather than offering resolution, Echoes Of Courage V creates space to sit within uncertainty and recognise that belonging is not always a destination. Sometimes it is something we continue making, through memory, through gathering, through light.

Image credit: Jonathon Griggs