Book Launch: Fragments of the Sky

Fragments of the Sky is an exquisitely designed book revealing an ingenious blend of memoir and biography. It is an image rich book describing the author’s creative response to a letter from a man claiming to be a long lost relative. The man, Ray Moult-Spiers, was an orphan whose childhood ended on the eve of the outbreak of WW2. Ray joins up and is trained as a jungle fighter in Malaya. When Singapore surrenders, he endures life as a prisoner of war in Changi and the horrendous Burma Railway POW camps. Ray survives and returns to Australia becoming an enigmatic mid-century artist of consequence.

Fragments of the Sky is a beautifully interwoven tale of two artists a generation apart, yet united in their love of creative expression. Join artist Julie Lenora Parsons in her exploration of the eccentric recluse artist, Ray Moult-Spiers, through an amazingly inspired odyssey toward the discovery of one of Australia's most fascinating mid-20th Century artists.

Parsons engages with this narrative not just as an art historian or biographer, but as an artist and writer — drawing on her own visual and performance background. This gives the tale a layered dimension: two creative lives, different eras, different modes, yet united in creative expression.

About the creator:

Julie Lenora Parsons is a professional arts practitioner and writer based in Fremantle, where she has worked on manuscripts for three publications as well as articles for OzArts magazine. Julie’s work as an imagemaker in both the visual arts and design for performance arenas has been a constant throughout her career. The integration of image with writing emerged in the late 1990s when she began preparing proposals for her public art submissions. Julie’s multi-disciplinary practice sees her published works riddled with imagery.