Feeling good

One of Australia's leading artists, Daniel Boyd is known for his nuanced interrogation of Eurocentric perspectives on Australian history and the ethics of colonisation. Boyd's works reveal an underlying theme of inheritance and explore the effects of time and memory on the interpretation of objects and images. His recent works investigate scenes and objects with cultural, personal and art-historical significance and are recognisable for their tactility, achieved through Boyd’s idiosyncratic painting technique wherein he erases portions of a scene, leaving behind raised lenses for viewers to look through.

Boyd’s painting Feeling good is from a 2009 exhibition of works titled Freetown which predates the adoption of the lens painting method. Depicting a herd of zebras encircling a lion, the work subverts conventional understandings of hunter and prey, liberty and confinement. Boyd said of the exhibition at the time:

Freetown; capital of Sierra Leone; ‘Province of Freedom’. The premise for its establishment: a location for emancipated slaves following the abolition of slavery.

The process of British liberation resulted in the relocation of Africans to an idealised and constructed freedom, often far from the life before. One that is imposed rather than chosen.

Imposition is a common theme across the works in Freetown. They are about the idea of freedom. A freedom that is complex, constructed and idealist.

A lion painting shows the return of the animal to its natural environment after captivity. The titles are love songs to illustrate a romantic idea of freedom.