Connie Burns Artist

Atrabilious : Depression of the Spirit

Title: Atrabilious: Depression of the Spirit (2006)

Atrabilious was my first large-scale drawing—a continuous work unfolding across twenty metres of gallery space at 150 cm high. It emerged from urgent necessity: creating as a means of survival during an intense period of mental illness. The project became a slow, public act of healing, bearing witness to the dying trees and parched landscapes along the Murray River.

Materially, Atrabilious was made with two 10‑metre rolls of Fabriano 300gsm drawing paper (150 cm wide), dense charcoal, water and long, physical mark‑making. I rubbed and traced tree surfaces, incorporated soil and ash, and worked in the heat and dust of drought-affected country. The process recorded both landscape and body—exhaustion, grief, sweat and sustained attention—so that the marks themselves hold the memory of that time.

Conceptually the work maps loss and persistence: stories of trees, the farmers who tended them, and the cultural and environmental stresses of drought. It is an elegy and a testament—an attempt to transform overwhelming experience into something that can be shared and held.

Atrabilious has been exhibited at Wagga Wagga Gallery, Shepparton Gallery, The Dax Centre (Melbourne University), and in regional venues in Castlemaine including Lot 19. The work is currently retired and has a personal, ceremonial place in my life: it will serve as my shroud at the time of death.

—Connie Burns