Meet Me Where I Am At

Tarsha Cameron

Foyer Gallery

After a big year I found myself telling friends and family that I needed a break; I wrote it in my journal and I said it out loud and then, crack, in a freak gardening accident I severely fractured my tibial plateau.. I lost the entire summer but found myself 11 weeks spent in acute care and rehabilitative hospital followed by six weeks outpatient rehabilitation, which I'm still in the midst of, took me to places I had never been. Places of the deepest dependency and vulnerability. Places of love, care, anger, sadness, deep depression, catharsis and letting go. Letting go of who I thought I was and my perception of the community that surrounded me.

These works are the resultant creations from this journey. They were created within the hospital setting with materials I had on hand. I came across a photograph I had taken of my mother tree. Like me, my mother tree was broken. She had been struck by lightning; a great shard of her charcoaled trunk jutting sideways and separated from the rest of her trunk, akin to my tibial plateau. I reflected on this and the anatomical similarity between bone and bough and realised how symbiotic our relationship now truly was. So, I began to experiment with layering a photograph of her with the one I had recently taken of my x-rays. Layers of scaffolded bones with a fractured tree.

After a period of making I had the great epiphany. My mother tree, although damaged, had continued to grow and thrive. Indeed, she created the entire stringy bark forest that surrounds her. This injury had made her even more majestically beautiful. Perhaps, like her, my injuries have not impeded me. I am not the result of the mental and physical health injuries planted upon my being. Like the mother tree,. I am still a whole person. I am not broken.

Layers of found photographs are interwoven with expressive pastel drawings of mother tree as I imagined my hospital experience. They represent both my connection to this tree and how my vulnerability, both figuratively and literally, have shaped me. As these works have been made in a completely foreign experimental way they speak precisely to the state of being that I am currently constantly held within. Hence, I ask you to meet me where I am at and I will always seek to be present with where you are at.

The art is the meeting place

The great paradoxical ambivalence

Heaves up into my chest

And then throat

Producing tears

I want to be free

But I don't want to be free

I want to have whatever everyone else has

But I simply cannot live that way

I am wife, mother, hag, and daughter

Of the forest

The wind and the river

But my wings have been clipped

I want to run into the garden

And sing with the spirits of the trees

But I fear

I will be incarcerated

I want to caress the wind and hold her tight

As she gives me comfort

But I fear my connection to humanityWill be severed

Not by the trees

Not by the wind

Not by the river

Exhibition opening

5:30 - 7:30pm

Thursday March 26th 2026

This exhibition will run from March 26th to April 25th 2026