Exhibition by Australian artist Simon Fisher as part of the ARé Fest 2026 Gaia Terrain program. "Making art is essentially a celebration of life—a means of expanding the dimensions of the everyday, a way of deepening the mystery of being human. It offers a wonderful opportunity to create a rich inner world where beauty, darkness, identity, memory, dreams, and the strangeness of it all coalesce in the creative act. I am a bricoleur. I tinker, I rearrange, I collage, I juxtapose thought and action—gesta non verba. I work from impulse, seeking to create joy in my soul and meaning in my heart. I am not an intellectual; I am an artist who is hugely influenced by poetry: Rilke, Rimbaud, Carlos Williams, and the whole array of twentieth-century American modernist poetry is grist to my mill. I read poetry to deepen my thought and bring substance to my practice. A major leitmotif of my work is the mask: becoming another, liberating an internal theatre of the mind. Playing is profound—it allows us to keep the inner child intact. I am particularly committed to the notion of using art to create ideas, rather than ideas to create art. I enjoy the haziness of not knowing, of allowing the art to create itself. The more you practice, the more the flow comes. Consistency is everything."