Tracy Dods 

Contemporary Paintings

Dod’s  striking beachscapes are putting new visual adventures on gallery  walls.

Her childhood in a north Queensland alternative lifestyle brings uncompromising insight, and often confronting commentary, to her work.

Drawing great inspiration from the writing of Albert Camus, Dod’s is troubled above all by contemporary loneliness and suicide.  Big problem !  It s in everyone s face but no-one takes any notice of it .

Her art seeks to widen awareness, as in her idiosyncratic series of businessmen walking into the sea.

Australian beaches reflect joy, hedonism, fun and of course the sun. Beneath this shimmering surface lies much more ; confessor, critic, soul mate and stranger .. The beach and the elements the ocean and the waves, they are friend or foe. There to take or bestow. The seascape with its strength rhythm and rhyme may not have all the answers but it will always be , to listen and to heal. Our beaches deliver therapy as it it s drawn from a collective memory of deep power and knowledge.

The juxtaposition of the man in the suit...is not about death but about introspection, about the goals we set ourselves, the quest for individualism and hence the loss of social interaction...a lifetime of earning money in order to keep up with technology, which in return isolates us from one another...It's about a generation unable to talk about their feelings.

Inspired by what Camus describes as the one truly great philosophical problem...and that is suicide.

Camus writes of the myth of Sisyphus the man condemned to ceaselessly push a rock up a mountain only to watch it roll back to the valley below...his impassioned argument for the value of life in a world without religious meaning .