May 25 to June 8, 2013
Join us for drinks with Margaret from 6pm on Saturday, May 25.
Click here to RSVP for the Opening Night.

Margaret Ackland’s new body of work interprets her experience of the Fowlers Gap landscape situated 112 kilometres north of Broken Hill. The title of the exhibition is so named after the UNSW Arid Zone Research Station to which Ackland and 12 other artists journeyed for a two weeks residency sponsored by the Artist Profile magazine. Fowlers Gap is a bleak and ancient place with occasional river red gums dotting the Station’s ephemeral creeks. Scrubby saltbush, bluebush and tiny wildflowers speckle the heat-hazed, corroded vastness. While most of her fellow artists expressed their responses to that arid region in terms of depicting its landforms and flora, Ackland chose to explore the impact the extreme conditions might have had on the lives and psyches of those who once dwelt there.

In the old Shearers’ Quarters where the artists were housed Ackland discovered a display of fading photographs. As her signature imagery has been the intricate rendering of disembodied, but curiously animated historical garments it was only natural that she would be drawn to the costumes the subjects were wearing. Ackland describes her fascination with those portraits of people dressed in staid Victorian outfits so at odds with the rigours of the environment. “I imagined the dreams that might have inspired them to relocate here, sometimes from halfway across the world. I sensed the alienation and the physical harshness they encountered and wondered what these ‘foreigners’ had made of the indigenous owners’ deep connection with this land.”

Clothing has a metaphorical resonance in Ackland’s paintings. It carries the imprint of personal histories, cultural identity and memory; traces of the essence of the wearer. In her Fowlers Gap works, the landscape itself now permeates attire. A delicate antique garment stands wraith-like against an impenetrable blackness in the Treeline painting. As if rent by the moonlight of bygone times, vestiges of scrubby, tree-lined hills appear among the embroidered knots and pin-tucks.

The figures depicted in the Arid Zone image are William and Fanny Campbell, or perhaps their daughter Elizabeth and her husband on their wedding day – the records are unclear says Ackland. William Campbell established the Fowlers Gap station in 1900. His wife Fanny bore him eleven children. Their stern, unsmiling faces and resigned, or is it determined stances confront the viewer. Here too, the darkening landscape penetrates their very beings in swathes of heavy sepia and scuttling cloudbanks. The atmosphere is electric, prescient.

Despite the stark, nocturnal imagery, Ackland’s paintings communicate a sense of stoicism and equanimity. They offer a meditation on the spirit of peoples, both pioneer and indigenous, who make a life amidst red dust heat, immense overarching skies and deep, engulfing silence.

Margaret Ackland has won and been a finalist five times in the Portia Geach Memorial Award. Thrice a finalist in the Blake Religious Art Prize, the preparation for her 2008 entry was the subject of the ABC television series, Compass. Ackland’s work is represented in a number of important collections including Artbank, the Holmes a Court Collection and the Deakin University Collection.

JACQUELINE HOUGHTON

Visit Exhibition

The exhibition ‘Margaret Ackland – The Arid Zone’ is showing at Anthea Polson Art, Shop 18-20 Mariners Cove, Seaworld Drive Main Beach QLD 4217 (next to Marina Mirage) from May 25 – June 8, 2013

Full Details Here…

Belynda Henry at the Brisbane Home Show…

Full sized photos here

Our thanks to John Walsh who opened the show. John is Director of the Gold Coast City Art Gallery.

More photos here.

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.

One of Erin Flannery’s lovely ladies featured in NYC’s

Huge cross-continental hugs to the lovely Lonny girls! xoxo

Martin was invited to have his paintings featured as part of the event On World Autism Awareness Day, April 2, 2013, when Autism Queensland and supporters turned the Queen Street Mall in Brisbane blue to raise awareness about people living with Autism.

Selected as an Exhibiting Finalist in the Salon des Refusés. S.H.Ervin National Trust Gallery
with her work The Smell of Rain  Watercolour and gouache on paper  76 x 115 cm

Full Details Here.