Opening Night:
Brigid Ryan  Embodying Landscape
Nikky Morgan-Smith  Shaping Water

April 20 to May 11, 2013
Join us for drinks with Brigid & Nikky from 6pm on Saturday, April 20.
Click here to RSVP for the Opening Night.

Brigid Ryan Embodying Landscape

Part landscape, part figuration, Brigid Ryan’s paintings bring together a multiplicity of things seen, felt and remembered. There is a feeling for the interconnectedness of all things and a sense of humanity as we enter her experiential response to place. Brigid describes her works as a kind of anthropomorphism of landscape. “There are many parallels between interactions in the natural world and relationships in human existence,” she offers. “By exploring the shapes, colours, patterns and textures of the land in conjunction with my domestic surrounds, I seek to give form to personal states of mind.”

A recent visit to an Aboriginal community in Central Australia was the initial catalyst for much of Brigid’s new works. “I was overwhelmingly inspired by the landscape and the Aboriginal women’s sense of spirituality that was linked to the land,” she says. Correspondingly, Brigid’s subjects also contain an immersive, animistic quality. Life is never static. Her paintings invite the viewer into preserves that are cumulative and continually evolving.

The works render the female form in a tenuous tying to alternately wide primordial landscapes and intimate but circumscribing domestic spaces. Soft, vulnerable flesh contrasts with the weathered rock of ages and striped fragments that signify her lounge room furnishings. Sometimes there is a sense of alienation and inner searching, at others, a sense of wholeness or integration. “What I hope becomes evident to the viewer is the solitude of the figures struggling against dissolution in the silence of the painted interior or exterior landscape,” muses Brigid.

The bird is a recurring motif in Brigid’s latest body of work. “Many native birds reflect in colour and markings their local environments,” she explains. “They symbolise for me the duality of forces and the delicate balance between fragility and adaptability, vulnerability and resilience.” In the painting The Turning Babbler Inside, a fitfully dreaming figure encounters the Babbler bird, that long-tailed, sociable creature whose untidy dome-like nest is assembled from a collection of thick twigs. The bird and the dreamer are separated by an arc of rhythmic blue lines suggestive of a body of water and representing a transitional state of cleansing.

Full Media Release Here.

Nikky Morgan-Smith Shaping Water

The art of Nikky Morgan-Smith might well be thought of as embodying Klee’s notion of unleashing the wanderings of the subconscious through gestural freedom. In her works drawing and painting unite to express a host of often fantastic, metamorphic imagery set amidst vapory bathrooms.. “The bathroom is a private, revitalising space, the domestic base for monotony to turn into adventure,” says Nikky. “A place of reverie behind a closed door. “

The bathtub has been a recurring motif in art history. Jacques Louis David, Pierre Bonnard and John Olsen each variously employed it, but for Nikky, “it is a vessel to hold a fantasy.” Her antique bathtub with legs like those of some fabled, clawed animal is the receptacle in which narrative unfolds. In many world creation myths water is the primordial fluid from which all life emerges. A mysterious substance symbolising cleansing and renewal, water also has associations with the intuitive and the feminine, as well as the creative processes. “I like the idea of water as an agency for transformation and shape-shifting,” Nikky confides. “The exotic animals appearing out of the steam are representations of things washed or changed. Always, they represent facets of human character, human emotions.”

Augmenting this idea of potentiality, Nikky’s new body of work has a nighttime cadence, as evidenced in the deeper blue of her palette and titles of the paintings. Night signifies a period of restorative rest and the realm of dreaming. It is a fallow period before new growth. The painting Heavy Water has a sad-eyed elephant seated heavily in a dissolving bathtub, its rainbow hues fading. It is as if the animal is adrift on a seemingly endless vastness in a none too sturdy vessel. No horizon or other point of reference can be discerned, just interminable blue, dripping, sliding water. Its curl-tipped trunk is raised, perhaps in salutation or scenting for signs of liberation, maybe just bailing water? The work’s title conjoins ecological and introspective concerns with a wry dash of humour.

In the painting Midnight Safari, water steaming from the showerhead surrounds a zebra like a dense, sultry mist. Head turned towards viewer and stripes rising from its body like a crest of chunky feathers, the animal seems well content despite our intrusion. From layers of overpainting traces of times past surface, or submerge, through the enveloping deep-night wall. A real plughole in the corner signifies the portal of release and the draining away of dross.

Full Press Release Here.