whirlwind.
Whirlwind embraces fragmentation as both process and theme, reassembling figures, episodes, and motifs from mythic traditions into a sprawling, ever-shifting composition. Developed in collaboration with the British Museum’s Blake Collection, London, the work builds upon William Blake’s The Lovers' Whirlwind from his illustrations to Dante’s Divine Comedy, extending Blake’s vision into a contemporary idiom. Like many of the great canonical epics, which evolved through centuries of retelling, accumulation, and revision, Whirlwind unfolds across the Courtenay Place light boxes, each an instalment in a broader theatrical sequence. As viewers move through the work, collaged forms emerge, dissolve, and reconfigure in response to the particular context of Te Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington Harbour), where the imagery remains in a continual state of collapse and renewal.
Although produced through digital processes and realised at an architectural scale, the work reflects the artist’s interest in the "etymology" of images: their layered histories and shifting meanings across time. Gods, heroes, and creatures merge to occupy the available spaces of the composition, while birds, beasts, and restless energies surge across the surface, entwining the mythic with the natural world. The work combines the visual clarity and precision of illustration with a compositional logic that remains fluid, contingent, and open-ended. Like the epics themselves, it continually absorbs new forms while retaining traces of earlier ones, allowing images to evolve through association, adaptation, and repetition.
The title evokes Wellington’s blustery winds, but the project also speaks to the turbulence of the cultural present: shifting climates, fractured narratives, and contested histories. It takes shape within the particular context of Te Whanganui-a-Tara, drawing on its windswept harbour, interwoven histories, and culture of performance, music, and storytelling. Designed for visual exploration along the street, the shifting scale and dense imagery resist passive viewing. Figures, animals, and symbols surface gradually, inviting close attention and active engagement. Each panel rewards careful observation with successive discoveries, drawing viewers into a world where myth, ecology, urban life, and imagination continually overlap.
Created for the Courtenay Place Lightboxes, Wellington.
William blake, the lovers’ whirilwind 1827
