Dord Burrough’s ‘Feelers’ exhibition and the psychedelic unknown

Words: Saskia Edwards

Photos: Jonathan Rae

Original Artwork: Dord Burrough

Objects and their functions no longer had any significance. All I perceived was perception itself, the hell of forms and figures devoid of human emotion and detached from the reality of my unreal environment. I was an instrument in a virtual world that constantly renewed its own meaningless image in a living world that was itself perceived outside of nature. And since the appearance of things was no longer definitive but limitless, this paradisiacal awareness freed me from the reality external to myself. The fire and the rose, as it were, became one.

That’s Federico Fellini describing a transcendental LSD experience.

Dord Burrough’s artworks trap you in this kind of psychedelic fantasy somewhere between a pastel Elysium and a hallucinatory nightmare. Dord says the delirium-like nature of her works is a representation of her life experiences.

“Those psychedelic experiences have an influence on the outcome.

“Those visual stimulus that one might experience that must have an effect on the way that I look at the world and paint.

“It’s sort of aesthetically comes out because that is an inspiration.”

Her current series ‘Feelers’ explores the external elements beyond temporal existence and the inherent spiritual potential in everyone.

“Whether they’re extensions of ourselves like auras and things like that but also of our environment,” Dord says.

“It’s about those non-physical element of ourselves and definitely spiritual elements to the works and I sort of think about our relationship with the spiritual in the current social context.”

Through the guise of her ethereal and almost tactile works, Dord explores the relationship between the spiritual and modernity. She says society is often left with a disconnected relationship with the mystical elements of life.

“On any level, Western culture isn’t left with those traditions that help us connect with each other and connect with our spiritual self, which I think is something makes it more difficult anxieties and things that are a big problem in our society.”

Dord graduated a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at QCA in 2008. Since then she’s lived, worked and exhibited in Berlin and currently lives between Brisbane and Byron Bay. She says her artistic style has been infiltrated with these travels.

“It’s really about life experiences and things that you draw from those experiences come out in the works.”

Dord’s artworks force introspection. It confronts the viewer with the metaphysical possibilities within us all and our fearful dislocation with the mystical.

The exhibition is on at Ryan Renshaw Gallery until April 5^th.