Ray Ching

Aesop, an illiterate slave, is the only survivor of a storm tossed galley ship that flounders in Southern seas and washes up, a wreck, on the coast of a great southern continent. Aesop assumes it to be the legendary Austral Land, an idea first voiced by Aristotle, and sets out in exploration. For many years Aesop travels the great island continent of Australia (for surely that's what it was) up and down from coast to coast, learning the ways of the birds and other animals that he encounters and tells, in fables, of things he has seen and heard but can never put to writing.

Much might have been lost, but for the Cockatoos, who took it upon themselves to commit to memory the great fabulist's stories, passing them down, family through family, for millennia. They ensured that the fables were told over and again, not the smallest detail lost, none allowed to slip from memory. Now, in this time of great change, artist Ray Ching has undertaken a series of elaborate and cleverly constructed paintings to form a permanent pictorial archive for the fables. Restricted to 460 individually numbered copies, Aesop's Outback Fables is not only the perfect complement to the exhibition of the same name; as a stand-alone work it will also appeal to devotees of the work of Ray Ching as well as lovers of Australia's unique wildlife.