Geography: responses to landscape

 Nicole Chaffey | David Middlebrook

Anne Marie Murland | Una Rey

An exhibition in the University Gallery

2 – 19 October 2013

The Australian landscape is an elemental experience. We exist between ancient stone and atmosphere that hums and sparks with history beyond the recollection of mankind. The ancient cultures of the first people tell stories of creation and upending change while newer interpretations explore what it means to make a home of such wild and capricious environs.

Landscape is dynamic, ever changing, and we are thrust along with it, compelled at every juncture to confirm our place within it. Visual exploration starts with ancient storytelling, while Arcadian post-colonial interpretations evolved as artists began to know their surroundings. This knowing opens the discourse and allows other investigations to begin.

It is these investigations that unite the four painters of Geography. All are faculty members of the University’s School of Creative Arts, and the individual practices of each expound the ideas of surface and space. The Australian environment does not reveal its secrets readily, and in responding to it, these painters do not necessarily seek to expose it.

Light, that which is particularly unique to our part of the world, provides a passage to experiential immersion. David Middlebrook and Nicole Chaffey seek sky and atmosphere that shifts and shimmers.

Annemarie Murland and Una Rey traverse the tactility of surface. Light here too, plays its role; interplays of reflection are lithe and percussive, shadows deeply and restfully quiescent.

Please join the artists for the opening on THURSDAY 10 OCTOBER AT 5:30PM