The impulse to represent the metaphysical possibilities of an environment, beyond the fixed or neatly understood, led French born artist Christophe Stibio to immerse himself in the vast and silent landscapes of the Australian desert. Through a painstaking process the artist pieces together small torn and cut sections of paper to map out a new topography of space, laced with personal longing.
The illusionistic quality of much of Richard Blackwell’s work ‘activates the mind to consider the transformation of the object from the physical to the virtual and back again.’*3 Responding to architectonic forms and urban design principles Blackwell combines the disciplines of drawing and sculpture to suggest warped perspectives, complex vanishing points and linear convergences found within the built environment.
Also working with the quality of line to suggest illusionary depth, Agneta Ekholm’s seductive paint surfaces operate in the margins between tactile fact and immaterial possibilities. The trace of the artist’s hand, moving in slow and fluid order, lays down translucent ribbons of colour. As the luminosity of individual colours shift and slide against one another, light and dark begin to create new, internal space within the canvas.
Central to Charlie Sheard’s dynamic abstract works is the tactile reality of paint itself. The spaces depicted are those of the canvas, the physical impact of materials on that surface and the relationship between the body and the pictorial frame. These works allow paint to move under the force of gravity, to drip and pool in response to the tilt of the canvas, or in keeping with the dynamic motion of the hand. Layers dry at different rates and colours seep within a maelstrom of paint and canvas.
The space between image and object is blurred in the sculptural paintings of Terri Brooks. In many ways a flâneur, Brooks absorbs the physical qualities of the built environment, delighting in the accidental textures and material surfaces of concrete, building materials or bitumen roads.
A lived, momentary experience of space is articulated in Dion Horstmans’ highly strategic sculptures. Fascinated with delineations of open space and implied movement, these works operate on both physical and implied levels. Stretching out to cover multiple points in space, their iron frameworks elicit ideas of architectural elevations, flight trajectories and the temporal pull of line and distance.
Sitting partway between the definitive and the meditative, Jo Davenport’s practice depicts both the physical truth of a landscape and the suggestive, subjective experience such spaces can evoke. A sense of immediacy drives the fluid and gestural quality of her mark making. As natural forms morph with a painterly, almost expressionistic concern for colour and composition, her drips and spills translate the observed qualities of rivers in flow, the sway of foliage in wind and the changing colours of light.
Text from ‘Time & Space‘ essay by Phe Luxford, 2012.
Exhibition runs from 31 July to 18 August 2012.