There is a different sensibility lurking beneath Jeremy Blincoe’s new, once again beautiful images in Fleeting Embrace to what he presented in Wander and Wonder last year. Though attempting to remain ambiguous there is a hint of tragic poetry in the work Samadhi (2011), a composited photograph of a slender, half-naked boy-child who floats alone in a blacker-than-black void. Attached to a parachute made from what could be discarded plastic bags, is he questioning how this child is to survive our impact on the environment? Look further and the work Sassy (2011) is of a small, bare-foot girl carrying snapper in a bag over her shoulder while she walks across a vast, empty white landscape but for the giant, hungry-looking polar bear following her. Though set on a Salt Lake in South Australia, with barren, brown hills in the distance that allude to another problem (drought), they could be in the North Pole. Is this a hint at the disappearance of the polar bear’s natural habitat through global warming? And then in Mae (2011) a young, seated blonde girl-child is tentatively approached by an antelope on a barren cliff-top that overlooks the ocean with a red, possibly post-apocalyptic, sun setting on the horizon. As Blincoe’s centauride in Emma compellingly suggests, children identify strongly with animals and nature in general. But these images seem to ask: what are we leaving for the children of this world? Perhaps the ‘fleeting embrace’ of the title is that these children are holding on to what is left before it disappears.

Kirsten Rann, July 2011