Roland Nancarrow’s international travels in the past decade include multiple
artist residencies at resorts in the Maldives, frequent trips to Sri Lanka and Japan, a South American trek travelling in Colombia, concluding with some time in India.
On return from Colombia he began sorting the back shed of his Cairns studio and found inspired from his travels:
"when I got back ... I saw the sculptural possibility amongst all the jagged offcuts and unfinished, half painted, broken bits of material which had piled up in there!”
The beauty of Spanish was as incomprehensible to him as the birdcalls. Hence, with no verbal references to distract him, he sought his path of creative escape in nature’s universal symbols. And, like the Phoenix, birds would be the visual metaphor for his new flights of imagination.
