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.
Unconcerned with symbolic import or socio-historic context, Jodie Wells’ paintings simply present a poetic linking with her domestic environment. “My studio is in my house, so working from home I have found inspiration from those things that are near to me – the objects and animals that I notice while doing my everyday activities and down at Byron Bay where I buy my art supplies,” says the northern Gold Coast artist.
Coalescing, dissolving – ever shifting, clouds and mists wreath primordial peaks in Elaine Green’s new body of work. The imagery portrays the majesty of the northern NSW landscape but also emanates a metaphysical sensibility.
The focus of Sydney-based Sophie Gralton’s art lies in the quality of interaction between medium and meaning. For her, what matters most is not visual accuracy but the relationship between image and ground and the seduction of visual surfaces. It is a misconception to think of Gralton’s work as primarily a nostalgic reflection on bygone times. On the contrary, she eschews any notion of sentimentality.
It is impossible not to become absorbed in the refined detail and mood of a Peter Smets’ painting. Never a mere recorder of visual facts, he deconstructs our habitual ways of seeing. With consummate skill, he persuades us that the contemporary world of industry and technology offers unexpected opportunities for aesthetic musings. Although the imagery in Smets’ new body of work revisits the construction sites that define his oeuvre, he tells that his interest is currently focused on the men who work there, albeit they are for the most part depicted in quiet moments of respite.
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