Luci Avard, Saturn in Aries Over Swamp Woods (Nirnroot Painting)

Artist: Luci Avard
Title: Saturn in Aries Over Swamp Woods (Nirnroot Painting)
Year: 2025
Material: acrylic on pine
Size: 570mm wide x 600mm high

Luci is an artist who lives in a swamp ghetto on Gumbaynggirr country. Her works are based on the visions of light she sees when she closes her eyes, and the mysterious landscapes she encounters - Dark but comforting waters are glowing, stingrays are falling stars, orbs are bodies floating up from the garden. Its the end of the world but there's a certain calmness.

When I first started working on this project, I was still carrying remnants of a long psychotic episode. During those times I tend to get obsessed with esoteric texts, spirituality, ancient history, anything that feels like it holds a hidden code - falling down rabbit holes that feel endless. In the early days of that headspace I was painting lighter things: glowing water, soft entities, nature as something luminous and kind. But when that lightness left me, I felt drawn into something more shadowy, something mysterious. That’s when Deer Empty began to take shape.

To find the inspiration I was needing I’d sometimes just drive until something called to me, continuing on from the tradition once started with my brother. Other times I’d scour satellite maps for weird patches of land that didn’t fit. A few times I used randonautica, that strange mix of tech and divination I was so into, and it led me to a place I had never even known existed - despite living here for most of my life. Discovering these locations felt like a kind of ritual, as if the locations revealed themselves only because I was asking for them.

So the works became their own system. Half diary, half map. They’re not fantasy, but they are a way of looking at the world as if it’s already enchanted, already haunted, already alive with residual energy.

In the end, Deer Empty isn’t really about demons or astrology or even the suburbs. It’s about that feeling that something else is always present -  watching, humming under the surface. The deer doesn’t run. It already knows.