A car accident a little over ten years ago changed award-winning Australian businesswoman Lyn Temby’s life forever. Whilst sitting stationary at traffic lights in New Zealand a few days before Christmas 2000, her car was rammed at high speed from behind.
Lyn suffered major brain injuries. The subsequent slow and painful rehabilitation process over the next decade helped her put some semblance of life back together. Whilst a complete personality change was one immediate outcome, she lost none of her intelligence. Instead, Lyn had to deal with depression, loss of memory, double vision and prescribed medication – as well as relearning many skills we take for granted, including simply getting out of bed.
An introduction to art and mosaics
Having moved to live in Darwin in the Northern Territories of Australia, she was introduced to the art of mosaics as therapy as part of her rehabilitation. But it was not simply the placement of small tiles into patterns. Collecting and smashing bottles, glass, ceramics was a fundamental part of her approach, helping relieve some of the pent-up frustrations of not always being able to communicate as clearly as she would have liked.
It certainly helped. Slowly, Lyn’s more vivacious personality re-appeared. And she found an outlet for her creativity – something she believes was never there before the accident. ‘I was a businesswoman, not an artist.’
Four years after being introduced to the world of mosaics, Lyn has found her niche and achieved considerable success as an exhibiting artist, including a solo exhibition at Darwin’s Supreme Court Gallery and sales to local, national and international collectors.
Crash, Smash & Pash III at Tacit Contemporary Art
Her latest is Crash, Smash and Pash III at Tacit Contemporary Art – her first in Melbourne, which runs until Saturday 5 March 2011.
For Lyn, it was important to exhibit outside of Darwin. An endorsement of a wider audience was crucial to her self-belief as an artist. And, never a person to do things in half-measures, she chose a baptism of fire – the daunting challenge of showing in Melbourne, the proclaimed cultural capital of Australia.
Many of Lyn’s works are pictorial interpretations of daily frustrations, emotions and feelings. But Concrete Thinking, Nightmares and Cracking Up are not melancholic or introspective. Use of mirror and glass dominate. Light is reflected, other works in the exhibition and the immediate surrounds mirrored, we as onlookers distorted and fragmented. They are about inclusion rather than exclusion: empathy rather than sympathy.
But other works in the exhibition celebrate positive thinking and potential. The title of the lead image, Because I Can #1, speaks for itself and is a glorious 1.5 metre by 1.5 metre square cacophony of colour – orange, blue, green, red and yellow. No less vivid, but smaller in size, Charlier! is a single stemmed flower named after her daughter. Light at the End of the Tunnel may be predominantly pieces of black glass, but its message could not be more clear.
A key aspect of Lyn’s approach to the mosaics, eliciting comments of being brave to do so, is the fact she makes a feature of the grouting - going against the grain in the artform. The smoothest of finishes is something Lyn is rightly proud of and one of the favourite parts of her art practice,
Keith Lawrence - Published writer of articles in magazines, newspapers and websites, predominantly on culture, alongside ghostwriter/editor/copywriter.
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