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.
Art, like life, is an undulating dance alternately radiant in possibilities, shadowed with limitations and then bright with resolution. A visceral understanding of such permeates Veronica Cay’s ceramic sculptures, collaged works and drawings which she describes as vehicles to encourage a reflection upon the human condition. “Manifesting the struggle in their making, the imagery can be complex and sometimes appear unresolved but this is purposeful as my intention is to express what it is to be human with all our frailties evident,” she offers. This sensibility was recently recognised with a successful exhibition in Berlin’s renowned August Strasse gallery district, as well as an invitation to present a course in Mexico City late last year.
A Melissa Egan painting has the power to transport the viewer far from the everyday and into another world where gravity has been cancelled and notions of time and place have long since dissolved. In her current series of works, the characters inhabiting the luminous realms reference those ‘quiet’ heroes who enliven our sensibilities and collude in our escapist dreams: the artists, poets, explorers and dissidents who have valiantly defied the status quo of their times.
Sweaney is nationally recognised for her images of houses that sensitively document a way of life now in flux and her recent paintings….
Gordon Richards celebrates the simple pleasures in works of art that bring visual delight to the viewer. His universe is one of light and radiant energy. “I am always attracted to the light dancing between objects and glinting off surfaces. Most of my images have a strong point of light. Light also refers to the subjects I convey through paint and charcoal,” he smiles. “The compositions are a bit like impromptu drawings or visual ramblings based on musings of events past and present.”
The title, Spring, is an apt one for Jodie Wells’ latest exhibition which opens in a season when all nature quickens and we too experience…
The logic of reproducing appearances has been abandoned in Cathy Quinn’s, shimmering, ambiguous landscapes. “My current practice is…
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