MARGOT BROUG

Margot Broug is an artist, therapist, poet and improvising InterPlayer, living and working in Newcastle NSW since 2009. Her studio of nearly five years is at the artists’ hub The Creator Incubator, Hamilton North, NSW.

Margot was born in The Netherlands and spent a lot of her childhood years travelling with her family and later lived in many European and Australian cities.

She is fascinated by life as a fundamentally playful and creative process, in which she participates. For her this means cultivating curiosity, love of beauty and embodied presence, to explore experiences and themes of consciousness in all areas of her life.

Margot runs monthly InterPlay classes in Hamilton. In her practice of InterPlay within the InterPlay community, she discovers emerging creativity in the embodied pursuit of enjoyment and fun in improvisation in connection with others. She loves to share the fun and invigorating space of Play with others, facilitating their reconnection to the PlayFul Self. She also runs a therapy business in Mayfield, practicing Body-Oriented Psychotherapy & Holistic Counselling. Margot also derives much joy from her volunteer role as a Primary Ethics teacher at her local primary school.

In 2022 Broug published in Anthology of Poems: Beyond Alienation Hatred and Terror: Compatriots with Love and Living-

Kind . In recent years Broug has exhibited in many group shows and her forthcoming second solo exhibition Growing Home 6-16th July at The Creator Incubator 15a /50 Clyde Street, Hamilton North, NSW.

Opening night 8th of July at 6pm.

Uncovering a sense of self

My mind will want to pre-empt the next move and make up rules about where the paintings is going. I attempt to, instead, lean into my feeling experience, rather than allowing the restrictive and confused old thought patterns to structure my experience and work. This has allowed the old ways of relating to myself and the world, to dissolve. In my art practice, as in other aspects of my life, this makes me more present and appreciative of what is right in front of me. This process has also become evident for me in what I paint. Lately, the grid like structures have become lighter and more balanced in line. They appear less defining and run parallel with my letting go of needing to define things in my life. They come more from feeling than from mind, seeming to be more representative of a state than an idea or concept.

I also relate this too the internal identity structures I have been letting go of after leaving a long-term marriage over 4 years ago. Identities are definitions of self that we put on like clothes. And sometimes those clothes were chosen by us, a long time ago, or they have been given to us by our family, culture, or society. The difficulty of taking those identity clothes off is that we feel naked without them; exposed and unsafe.

In letting go of the identity and story I had about my life, I found a sense of self in my own presence. And where identities can be an inflexible and restrictive structure, sense of self is dynamic, organic, and fluctuating. And where I lived a number of defining and sometimes conflicting identities before, what I now experience is a sense of self created from my own more centred presence. This is home.

Inspiration reaches for reality

‘Growing Home’ is about letting go of externally derived identity, to move towards trusting my own lived experience, and allowing that to shape the home that is my life. I had ideas of course, of what I wanted to experience when I started living for and by myself. Initially I wrote down these visions I had for my own life. Until art took over from writing. For about three years I couldn’t put a word to paper. I can see now, looking at my paintings (and drawings) that my ideas were presenting themselves as organic grid structures and improvised line work. And in this exhibition, a number of the paintings show these grids are reaching down to earth, an inspiration reaching down to material reality.

Learning to Play

When we think of something we want to create, our mind will generate a multi-dimensional mental image of it. We then go about the process of working to create this in material reality. In the process of doing so, we can come up against limits of what is possible. If we are making a sculpture, we might come up against materials not acting in the way that we need them to, to make it the same as out mental image. Or we might come up against the extent of our skills. Even so, for many artists this is also very much the challenge of making art; to grow in ability and skill. This concept doesn’t only relate to the process of making art, but also of course to general living. We have dreams for our lives of what we want to experience, do, have or how we want to live meaningfully.

There comes a time then, when we need to let go of the perfect mental image and play with what is actual, which is the interaction with the unknown. Play is an important word in my life. In Play I relate to reality as it presents itself to me.

Leaving The Creator Incubator after 6 years

‘Growing Home’ also refers to process of getting to know and appreciate myself as an artist. Having been a TCI (The Creator Incubator) Hatchling for 6 years has helped me accept and validate my own life-given individuality. I have been surrounded by the creative expression of the other wonderfully individualistic Hatchlings. Often, I have walked around in awe at the infinite breadth of diversity, beauty and also of effort, in the studios around mine. This diversity and beauty of expression is evident everywhere. Even in my studio, as I have come to realise…… If I but keep my heart and mind open to it. And like anywhere, in this community, there is also the sometimes very human and painful fact of what it takes to live one’s individuality. And during my residency here, when life was difficult at times, my ‘Growing Home’ also came about through the support of the TCI family. Even so, the time is ripe to leave the warm incubating lights of this place and move my art practice to the newly stoked fire of my own home.

The Things Between

Website: www.margotbroug.com.au

InterPlay : www.interplayaus.com.au

All Rights Reserved on article and photographs

Margot Broug © 2023.

Page 216 : The untitled and eagerly defining lines of materiality

H92 x W60 cm. Oil on canvas, Margot Broug 2022.

Finalist in the 2023 Hunter Emerging Artist Prize.

Right : Detail - The untitled and eagerly defining lines of materiality