The Lost Sea is an elegy to the artist’s late father and to the Aral Sea, a vast inland sea in Uzbekistan that has almost completely dried up due to Soviet mismanagement in the 1960s. The remaining desert is called the Aralkum. The resulting salinity crisis is an environmental catastrophe. Having worked with salinity in the Murray Darling Basin, Hall’s father was involved in attempts to remediate the Aral Sea. Using imagery from photographs taken while visiting 20 years ago, Hall’s paintings speak to a sense of absence and the impossibility of return, both environmentally and temporally. In thinking about this absence and the desire to bear witness to it, Hall turned to the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah and particularly Lot’s Wife, who is turned into a pillar of salt after she disobeys God by turning around to see her city burn. Traditionally used as a cautionary tale, here she is recast as a witness that chooses to turn and look at what she has lost; her salty tears becoming a personification of grief.
Image credit: Lizzie Hall, Aral Sea 2001 Momento Mori (detail) 2024, oxide and oil on linen, 115 x 170cm. Photo by Stephen Best
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