Of the Night: Lottie Consalvo

For Consalvo, the creatures that live in the dark are not menacing. They are gentle, companionable, and guiding. The painting, She looked up at me and said, 'you're not afraid of the dark, you're afraid of what's in it, is named for the sage advice given to Consalvo by her daughter, Hester. Hovering within this work is the form of a stingray, a creature of the nocturnal sea. She tells me that owls follow her from her home in Newcastle to her sacred space in Pindimar, where she spends part of the week meditating and painting alone.

In these paintings the natural and spiritual worlds become one. Night weeds shapeshift into crucifixes. Forest creatures become devotional forms. Trees are messengers between worlds. Consalvo understands that nature is our original temple. Forests dwarf us with the same awe as the vaulted ceilings of medieval cathedrals. These paintings remind us that our earliest experiences of devotion and reverence came not from churches, synagogues or mosques, but from standing beneath endless skies, inside the damp corners of caves, before immense oceans, and, deep within the bush at night.

To go as deep into the strange lucidity that happens at night, when one world shuts down and another opens and Consalvo is alone with her thoughts, is an act of trust. It is also an act of resistance. Consalvo is disenchanted by the rigidity, obligations and hyperproductivity of the nine-to-five world. Conversations deepen at night, she tells me. People share stories. We are more likely to believe in ghosts at night. We think of death, romance and the unknowable. We share thoughts that would be unutterable under the sun. “You’re not talking about your finances at 3am,” she says.

The nocturnal instincts are genetic, both her father and grandmother and great grandmother become animated in the dark hours. She laughs at a memory of her father seeing his grandmother hauling a tree trunk up a flight of stairs in Italy at 3am. “But that’s what you're doing,” I tell her when she tells me about her night time quests through the bush, visiting the trees and animals that she convenes with. It is here that Consalvo questions if there is more going on in the night that we have lost connection with through our modern lives. It’s the traces of these forms, half-seen, half felt on her nocturnal wanderings, that live inside her paintings. Even the pale surfaces glow as though caught in moonlight or lit up by the headlights of a car. The longer we look at them, the more they reveal, as though our eyes, too, are adjusting to the dark.