Geopolitics, climate change, and global tensions have infinite repercussions on the lives of people all around the world. Every life choice, every act of migration is a distillation of the universal into a personal experience.

Small Bones of Courage forms a profound contemplative space, where complex themes of self-identity and personal geography are explored and negotiated by women artists who share an experience of dislocation or fragmented memory. Their work reflects a universal poetic landscape, that of the jagged terrain of the heart and the distant vistas of memory.

Each artist charts her own identity, creating connections between old and new knowledge through memory and experience. Small bones of courage emerge, as infinitely personal acts of tenacity are remembered. Each artist’s story is a physical and individual form of migration.

The works in the exhibition – many of which are intensely delicate and sensitive – reflect the emotion invested in the drawing out of the artists’ inner lives. Together, the works convey the recurring phenomena of absence and disappearance in the artists’ mapping of intimate terrains, as they narrate stories of families, women, war, displacement, history, and migration.

[The title Small Bones of Courage is the title of a song by the New Zealand songwriter, Aldous Harding.]