Cirrus@Austlit

'To flip through the thick, matte pages of Theory of Colours is to wander around an abandoned theme park at dusk. Dimly, you can make out certain structures in the falling light: a hotel, a museum, a swimming pool, and various attractions harnessing the vertiginous interplay of height and depth, including mountains, valleys, towers and gaping chasms. Picking through the brittle skeletons of these forms, testing your weight along beams of decaying wood and surveying barren microclimates, you sense the 'certain feverish appeal that this carnival once held. This has faded now to reveal a kind of 'peculiar and suspended charm', both timeless and utterly defined by its vulnerability to the ravages of time. The colours are cracked, consumed by grey, peeling to reveal blank, bone-white surfaces or blooming like weeds and spreading over paths, walls and boulders. The theme park is on an island, or on the waterfront like Luna Park. You can smell old salt in flicker at the air. Petals glow neon in the dimming light and shad the edges of your vision.' (Introduction)