Home sweet home: Back in Echuca after spending 10 months in Toronto, Heidi Falzon with the piece she started while in hotel quarantine.
Artists find inspirations in unusual places.
Hold tight - we’re checking permissions before loading more content
For Echuca artist Heidi Falzon it was a more deliberate search for refuge from the isolation of a two-week quarantine that inspired her latest artwork.
She was forced to complete a fortnight in lockdown conditions after returning from a trip to Canada to visit her dying father.
“He was very ill, and has since passed. The whole experience was extremely difficult, I felt like I was a prisoner for a period of time,” she said.
Heidi was in a much happier place when The Riv camera met with her at the launch of The Foundry Art Space’s latest exhibition on Friday evening.
She shared the story of the inspiration for her piece in the company of works from 25 other artists involved in the latest instalment of The Foundry’s monthly exhibitions.
There are 148 pieces on display, ranging from paintings to sculptures and everything in between.
For Heidi the installation of her quarantine work in the art space was an opportunity to reflect on the torturous period in a Richmond hotel.
“I was actually very depressed at the time of starting the artwork. I was just very fortunate that I had my paints in my luggage,” she said.
“But I only had tiny pieces of canvas and I needed larger (ones) in order to complete the piece.”
Enter Uber and Heidi had the larger canvasses delivered to her hotel quarantine room.
She left for Toronto in December last year to visit her father and after spending 10 months in the freezing Canadian winter, returned on a long-haul flight via Abu Dhabi at the end of August.
“The plane was full from Toronto to Abu Dhabi, but there were only five people on the flight from Abu Dhabi to Melbourne,” she said.
“They wouldn’t even let us sit in first class.”
On arrival in Melbourne Heidi said the scene which met her felt like something from a scene from the Dustin Hoffman film Outbreak.
“There was just plastic everywhere. And they asked me a series of questions to ascertain my state of mind,” she said.
“After doing that they sent us to different hotels. I still have the $3000 bill to prove it.”
Heidi said she did not spend much time watching television, instead focusing on her artwork.
By George: Jerzy (George) Brzuskiewicz with the sculpted piece titled Bye Gone Era. The Polish-born Echuca resident of the past three years had several pieces on display, including a piece called Burned 2020. He created the sculpture during the Australian bushfires, featuring a burned palm tree leaf with sun-bleached heads.
A phone call from an Echuca gallery ordering one of her well-known birch tree paintings got her back in the swing of things and the piece inspired by her longing for the ocean followed soon afterwards.
Nine COVID-19 tests later and she finished the painting outside of quarantine, happy to be in the presence of art lovers for the Friday evening launch at the Port of Echuca.
19°C