Luci Avard, Sleep Colossus

Artist: Luci Avard
Title: Sleep Colossus
Year: 2025
Material: acrylic on pine
Size: 470mm 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.

The title Deer Empty came from when Luci was on a video chat with her brother while he played the remastered version of Oblivion. Oblivion was pivotal for Luci and the game had just been re-released.

Luci doesn’t have a PS5 so her brother was showing her his gameplay on a video call together while they chatted about the nostalgia and lore surrounding the game. While she was watching him play on call, he accidentally killed a deer.

Luci watched him go up to it and an option came up to loot the body for items, as you do — but it just said “Deer Empty”

And immediately Luci was like, that’s me babe, I am so empty

This painting show is a series of psychic scenes built from swamps, outskirts, and the in-between.

Deer Empty moves through the thresholds of ghetto suburbia — behind the shopping centre fences, industrial areas, through the muddy shortcut tracks, past half-built structures and powerlines humming above weed-choked lots. These are places most people don’t look at twice, but here, they become a myth.

Each work is part of a quiet system — one made from dream fragments, streetlight rituals, astrology, demonology, and loose-worldbuilding drawn from everyday observation. Coordinates are found using tools like randonautica or satellite maps, like divination. Landscapes and figures emerge through memory, fear, impulse, and a kind of generated mythology that feels both personal and uncanny.

There are spirits in the drainpipes, satellites in the empty fields, sigils carved into industrial ruins. Some of the paintings echo scenes from video games once used as comfort — spaces where lore governed everything, and wandering felt sacred. These are not fantasy works, but reflections of a world already surreal: soft horrors and beautiful glitches.

The show unfolds like a haunted interface between nature and residue — between what’s left behind and what keeps watching.

Nothing here is explained. It is meant to be encountered. Not everyone can see it, yet they still observe the same thing.

The deer does not run.

It already knows.