Spider’s eye: The story paintings of John Prince Siddon and Mervyn Street
The titles of certain John Prince Siddon paintings intimate a world gone awry: Caught in a Trap (2023), Stop War Please (2022), Enough is Enough (2020). It might be that history is a pile of wreckage and Siddon its poet, a poet whose strange stories are told in and through densely patterned and chromatically rich paintings. In Walter Benjamin’s famous formulation of the ‘angel of history’ the angel is thrust off by the storm of progress as he watches, gasping, as the wreckage pile grows skyward. In the settler-colonial context, this wreckage was initiated by colonial invasion, and propelled by extractive capitalism and carceral violence. From this pile-up, Siddon, a Walmajarri man of the Great Sandy Desert in Western Australia, has found a way to ‘make whole what has been smashed.’ The poetic painter refuses ‘progress’ in preference for renewal, often making refuse his ground: ‘roo skins, bullock skulls, 44-gallon drums. In their variance, his paintings juggle different forms and genres — ancestral figures, traditional motifs, the cops, Christian iconography, insects, politicians, Danny Green and Anthony Mundine in a three-way match with a boxing kangaroo. It’s a world in discrepant relation.
