These images aren’t real or truthful, though they are authentic. They are imagined landscapes – memories of past experiences. Reality can be unreliable. What seems to be presented isn’t really there, and what’s exposed isn’t as it initially appears. As you look at the water, you see the sky - the reflection is deceit.

The number ten represents ordinal perfection. It symbolizes completeness - nothing lacking and nothing in excess. For me, ten is significant because it contains the symphonic nature of the universe, and marks the full course of life.

It’s been over two years since I spent six months in the Northern Territory working on a commission and exploring the surrounding landscape. The intense emotional veracity of the last series of works, Symphony, has given way to a subtler interpretation of the same sense memories. Ten is a continuation of that conversation, though through the lens of time. The works are fantastical reimaginings of past experience, more heavily steeped in meditation and in the internal return of heart and mind to a previous sanctuary.

Danelle Bergstrom, exhibition artist statement, 2011