Rather than being realistic representations, Quinn’s paintings seek to convey the experience of an immersion in landscape and the joy of special times shared with family and friends. She recounts how everyday concerns evaporate when looking into the expanse above and beyond; her skin brushed by a gentle breeze carrying the clean, salty smell of the sea; the air alive with a chorus of insects.
Acclaimed photographer Samantha Everton will this year present Indochine, a dynamic new exhibition series which explores the intersection of Western influences and Eastern traditions. Indochine depicts a woman navigating the conflicting cultural pressures of the East and the West. Exuding visual luxury and vivid sensuality, the artworks plunge the viewer into a colour-saturated dreamscape. The series explores the encroachment of Western fashion within Asian cultures and the struggle for authenticity amidst contemporary influences.
Sunshine generally connotes warmth, vitality and a sense of contentment. In many world traditions it is synonymous with the radiance of spiritual enlightenment. Although philosophical and ecological musings inform the imagery in Seabastion Toast’s new body of work, her intention is more to do with sunshine’s power to illuminate and educe form. The title of the exhibition really describes what we do as painters, explains Toast. Everything we see is a reflection of light. My subjects operate to map the beams of light as they bounce off form. I am searching for the visual rhythms.
Huge skies vault over brown-grassed plains that stretch to distant horizons. A single house stands seemingly mute in the absence of human habitation. The sense of quietude is profound, but look more closely at Melitta Perry’s landscapes, something is astir – the quickening.
Autumnal harvest festivals throughout the ages have celebrated the forces of nature, bringing the community together to share the joy of abundance and listen to bardic ruminations. The art of storytelling was highly valued for it was the means by which a culture’s traditions and values were kept alive through tales both entertaining and instructive. Aptly titled and timed, Melissa Egan’s latest exhibition presents as a visual cornucopia harvested from the fertile depths of an imagination that ‘garlands’ personal experience and historical vignettes.
Robyn Sweaney is renowned for her images of houses that signify something beyond their often unremarkable facades. A distillation of observed and remembered phenomena, her paintings conjure a sense of introspective quietude. She has always been interested in architectonic precepts, particularly those pertaining to post-war Modernism. Her new body of work however, has been subtly infused with ideas fostered as a consequence of reading the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius’ theories. He believed that architecture affected the everyday life of citizens and therefore should emulate the universal laws of nature.
A classical serenity embues the bronzes Piperides creates. Light gently caresses rounded volumes and lustrous, burnished surfaces. Enormous skill is required in the lengthy and painstaking processes involved in bringing mute, raw materials into a life-suffused, physical reality. Piperides meticulously presides over every stage. In the new body of work, rather than striving for a preconceived outcome, he has responded to the poses his live models have naturally assumed.
An Avital Sheffer vessel resonates a palpable presence born of its primordial substance and her visual articulation of a profound understanding that embraces the natural, corporeal and spiritual worlds. “There is a universal artistic lineage which touches a place that is beyond time and cultural dichotomies,” says the now internationally acclaimed ceramic artist. “The integration of notions of utility, aesthetics and divinity in vessel-form is as ancient as conscious existence.”
Inspiration slips easily into Christabel’s world. Surrounded by gardens, cats, art and music, she doesn’t have to search far to find her pictorial muse. Images appear amidst her daily life; the cat observing a pair of dueling butterflies in her florid garden, her beautiful daughter arriving home clasping a single symbolic rose or an open window with patterned curtains swirled by a gentle breeze. She has explored these images further by focusing on their underlying unifying force, which is that of love.
‘There is a certain sensitivity and heightened awareness, seemingly peculiar to artists, that compels them to investigate the vicissitudes of life – to probe relentlessly at some existential core’. The profound ruminations underpinning Carolyn V Watson’s subject matter may be said to exemplify this dictum. An interaction of medium and meaning, her sculptures and ‘drawn paintings’ on linen embody a dimension of experience that helps define our humanness.
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