Incorporating installation, sculpture, drawing and textiles, Lia McKnight's artistic practice explores themes of transformation, memory and ritual, privileging lived experience and emotional geographies as areas of intrigue.

The title of this artwork and associated series of work 'Sacred animate' takes inspiration from an ecological form of animism that describes a dynamic exchange between humans and nature. Sustained by ongoing field research, this series insistently speaks to a sense of place.

In the creation of new work for Joondalup CIAA, the artist found inspiration in the remaining bushland around Warwick where she spent her childhood. She developed this series of work by photographing natural patterns, strange plant forms, fungi and delicate orchids and have collected small findings that are studied like precious objects.

Processes of growth and decay provide a primary point of focus in Sacred animate series, as ecological cycles become metaphors for personal transformation. Interweaving imagery from the natural environment with a process-driven ‘stream of consciousness’ technique, my drawings and assemblages explore the forms that lurk beneath the conscious mind.

Suppressed desires and fears emerge as eerie dreamscapes, like mental maps to an uncanny and erotic terrain. Enjoying an interplay between the real and imagined, these works are intended to be at once alluring and disarming.