Lottie Consalvo: Cigam

We Were Never Just Weeds
By Dina Jezdić

There is a dandelion growing somewhere nearby.

Perhaps it has pushed its way through a crack in the pavement, appeared at the edge of a garden in the early days of spring, or taken hold in a patch of grass. It is common enough to be overlooked, most often thought of as a weed, a nuisance, something to be pulled from the ground and discarded. Yet the dandelion has a history that sits uneasily with this dismissal. For centuries, it was gathered deliberately, its young leaves eaten as a spring green, its roots used in medicine, its flowers prepared into poultice. In Arabic and Persian medical traditions, and later in European herbal practices, almost every part of the plant was valued, particularly for its associations with digestion and liver health.

Dandelion comes from the French dent-de-lion, “lion’s tooth”, a reference to the sharp, serrated leaves that sit beneath its yellow flower. What we now call annoyingly persistent was once a plant to be noticed, its bitterness used to be welcomed in spring, when fresh greens were scarce and the first tender leaves offered something nourishing after winter. It is remarkably resilient, grows where it is not invited, returning when it is removed, and refusing to be contained. It is also a recurring presence in the paintings of Lottie Consalvo.

Cigam turns magic backwards, asking us to reverse our assumptions: to pause and give our attention to what we have learned to disregard, dismissing it as ordinary, useless or inconvenient, and to wonder whether what we call magic might instead be an ability we have forgotten. For Consalvo, this question extends a practice long concerned with the entanglement of interior life, nature and the unstable territory between what can be seen and what can only be imagined. Her earlier works explored longing, loss, desire and the pursuit of happiness; increasingly, these concerns have opened into questions of consciousness, spirituality and the invisible worlds that might exist alongside the material one. In Cigam, she wonders about capacities we may once have inhabited more fully in our dreams: the ability to fly, to move objects with the mind, to sense what lies beyond the immediately perceptible world. The paintings inhabit this threshold between the known and the mysterious, where a flower might carry a message, an ordinary object become charged with energy, and the body itself contain faculties we have yet to awaken. Magic becomes a way of opening our perception, inviting us to reconsider whether some of what we call impossible is instead a part of ourselves we have simply forgotten how to access.

From this perspective, the dandelion becomes an unlikely mirror. Its history points to broader forgetting, in which accumulated capacities are easily overlooked and perceived as rudimentary. For generations, plant knowledge was woven through everyday life, passed down through households and communities as part of everyday practice. As medical authority became increasingly concentrated within professional and institutional systems, much of this knowledge was recast as superstition, folklore or something less worthy of attention. Consalvo’s paintings conjure the dandelion back into visibility as an antidote for what might be possible beyond the boundaries of the familiar.

We are extraordinarily consumed with the physical world, productivity, accumulation and survival, while the interior and ineffable are increasingly treated as distractions. Our minds are scattered across a constant stream of information designed to fill every pause; even the space before sleep, once given over to drifting thought, reverie or contemplation, can now be occupied by another screen. Consalvo describes humanity as having evolved “too far”: remarkably successful at reshaping the world according to our own needs yet increasingly disconnected from the life around us and from ways of knowing we have pushed to the periphery. Her paintings create a space in which that attention might be reclaimed. Hovering between deliberation and surrender, her painterly gestures can appear spontaneous, even elemental, yet they lean into ritual, meditation, spells and the receptive openness to possibility. By being interested in the strange threshold where psychological experience and spiritual belief begin to overlap, her work manifests through energy without reducing or dismissing inexplicable encounters to coincidence just because they cannot be measured. Consalvo’s critique of contemporary life is therefore inseparable from her spiritual enquiry. The problem is not simply that we are busy, but that busyness has become a measure of value; we congratulate ourselves for exhaustion and mistake productivity for purpose. Against this, the works beckon towards becoming who we need to be rather than who we want to be. Wanting belongs to the language of desire, choice and self-fashioning. Needing suggests something deeper: an attentiveness to the self beneath the roles we have been taught to perform.

Dogs, moths, bats and stingrays increasingly inhabit Consalvo’s paintings as companions of enquiry. Across these works, the boundary between human and animal becomes porous, unsettling the assumption that consciousness is exclusively human while simultaneously infusing the imagery with the belief that we share souls with other animals. This entanglement reaches back to the earliest human image making, when animals appeared alongside traces of ritual, movement and perhaps lost forms of knowledge in caves and dark sanctuaries. Plato later made the cave an allegory of perception itself: a place where shadows can be mistaken for reality. Darkness becomes a condition for seeing differently, a space in which intuition, imagination and belief can surface. Consalvo’s palette has moved through earthy browns, greys and blacks towards dusty pinks, with yellow increasingly emerging as a luminous presence. Approaching the gold of religious painting, it carries the material weight of devotion: precious substance, reflected light, illumination, wealth and divinity.

The video work extends this fascination with ritual into a story that hovers between autobiography, coincidence and supernatural possibility. Gesture, objects, sound, fire and arrangement gradually form a sequence in which a childhood wish to make love last forever is revisited from the perspective of its undoing. Consalvo’s spell becomes a meditation on release, recalling the familiar ritual of blowing on a dandelion’s white seed head and sending its wishes into the air.  

What begins as a flower rooted in one place becomes hundreds of tiny travellers, each seed carried by its own parachute towards another life and possibility. Here, dispersal becomes the magic of letting go. It is a call to pay attention. The unknown may already be growing beneath our feet. And perhaps the real magic is discovering that we were never just weeds.

Dates: 17th Sept – 7th October.
Exhibition Preview: Thursday 17th Sept: 5.30pm
Artist Talk and Book Launch: Saturday 3th October (2.30pm)
Location: Föenander Galleries - 1 Faraday Street, Parnell