To Perdure

The line between allowing and admitting is very fine. When we treat the two as separate greetings for separate guests, that line becomes clearer; the allowed guest is permitted, tolerated. The admitted guest — admitted to a home, to a care, to a privacy — is taken in their entirety, the host willing to know them in earnest.

True admittance is scarce. A feat, even. No one thing or being exists without containing a multitude of clashing truths — some we’ll accept, others we’ll struggle to endure. What’s spoken of less, perhaps because its achievement is so rare, is our ability to perdure. To exist not in spite or defiance of oppositions, but gracefully alongside them.

Lindy Lee admits the being of every jarring truth in our cosmos through work that, through perforations of paper and steel, breaches the divide between solid and frail, massive and micro, blooming and grown. The act of piercing ordinarily presents a threat. If a membrane is pierced, it becomes vulnerable and anything precious it protects becomes prone to the leak, to hungry sight, to harsh light and air. When Lee pierces, she allows forms and elements to meet, granting each hole not as a gash, but as a doorway. The need for protection is dissipated and the need for coalescence is firm. Her work unravels thresholds into tightropes, with truth lying not on another side, but in walking the endless line of discovery itself.

It should be impossible to create a single object, a form that can be independently defined, that is successful in communicating endlessness. Lee has found that success in a piece that appears paused in its own dissipation. A unity without boundary.

Lee’s Ouroboros 2024, commissioned by the National Gallery of Australia, serves as a monument to boundlessness. The snake caught in the act of eating its own tail exists as an immediately recognised symbol of infinity, dating back to Norse, Ancient Greek and Egyptian iconography. Lee epitomises that infinity with a structure that can be entered. The eyes enter through a mass of perforations in the snake’s steel skin, the body enters through a mouth-made-doorway, and the elements enter as light relents into the belly of the beast, air whistling through its wounds. Even its surface is mirrored, permitting us to become part of the snake in a reflection that absorbs all surrounds. Lit internally at night, Ouroboros gives just as it receives, morphing into a beacon of hope in the clarity that comes from acceptance.

In the Gallery’s Sculpture Garden, Ouroboros reflects a pool of water and swallows the shed of neighbouring trees. The snake is settled in Lee’s Zen Buddhist faith where, under an open sky, every component exists as one, without division. There is an absolute resolution in the work that comes not from selecting options, but from admitting that there are none; not interior nor exterior, not whole nor scattered, not open nor closed. We are called, by the snake’s example, to perdure ourselves.

Lindy Lee has created a threshold not to be traversed but inhabited.

This story is part of the 2024 Young Writers Digital Residency.