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Look! Dead Bird! This is my kind of wild life photography; forget the excruciating hours in a mosquito infested swamp courting malaria or worse. Far better to shoot it in the studio in civilised proximity to refrigeration and Japanese finger food. This series, Birds, is a development of Marian’s Australiana project which has been exhibited widely here and overseas. In this series she’s combined native birds, domestic fabrics and vessels as subjects.

A lot has been said about Marian Drews’ debt to European traditions of still life. The rich, painterly aesthetic she employs through her idiosyncratic application of light and her stylised composition certainly constitutes a nod to old masters and one could easily be forgiven for simply wallowing in the pleasures of seduction. But these images are more than a Euro centric speculation about the palatability of our plump breasted, native bird life; they’re embedded with a range of critical possibilities. Marian’s quoting the aesthetic conventions of the old world to initiate new dialogues between our past and our present, urging us to deeply consider our relationship with the place we live, both local and national, and the things we share it with. These pictures challenge the enduring conception of nature as a god given resource for us to squander at whim.

Be it modest peasant fare or a noble feast, the dinner table reveals a lot about the people who set it. It’s a place where our society’s shifting and often conflicting customs and practices of consumption are debated through ritual, where our social identities and roles are consolidated; one generation transmitting its expectations and values to the next, reflecting ideological affiliations of class that underpin our various conceptions of and aspirations for nationhood.

Drawing from symbologies of the intimate, the domestic and the feminine, these images evoke anxieties arising out of different values and priorities. They invite us re evaluate our conceptions of natural and artificial; civilisation and savagery; the domestic and the foreign, the rational and the spiritual; the new world we confront and the old one we’re leaving behind.

By placing what is indigenous to Australia in a visual context that invokes the spectres of our colonial past, these works form an eloquent metaphor for our current environmental discord. If we are to progress in harmony with nature, perhaps we might try and outgrow that childish assumption we have dominion over all that crawls, swims and flies.

Extract from catalogue essay by Ray Cook, the catalogue will be available from the QCP during the exhibition.