Artist Statement:

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Cedar Roppola is an interdisciplinary artist working across painting, drawing, video, sound and performance. Their practice explores embodiment, transformation and the relationship between body and place, with a particular interest in ecological connection and myth.

Butoh forms an important part of Roppola’s approach to making. Rather than using it solely as a performance practice, they use Butoh as an intuitive, embodied response to place. The body becomes a way of sensing elements, sensations, feelings and images that arise through being present in a particular environment. This embodied way of paying attention informs their paintings and AV works, transforming experiences of place into images, movement and sound that sit somewhere between the physical world, memory and imagination.

The work is led by a curiosity about a sense of timelessness that can emerge through embodied attention, a feeling of being fully present while also experiencing something beyond ordinary time. Water, bodies and landscapes become recurring images through which transient experiences crystallise, taking on a strange and mythic shape. A moving body, flowing water, an internal state or a landscape can be contained within an image, revealing the timelessness of continual ephemerality.

Water has no fixed form, yet through its perpetual presence it shapes stone and land. In a similar way, grief is not something that can simply be overcome. We grow around it, becoming shaped by what we carry. Personal grief can intersect with ecological loss, connecting what is carried within the body to the larger grief of a world undergoing profound change. Myth offers a way of moving through these intersections, where the personal and ecological can meet.

In this space between body and place, the work invites a slower kind of attention, a space to feel present, encounter what is carried within, and consider our own relationship with the world.

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