Exhibitions offer insight into spirit
TWO collaborative exhibitions in the region include an installation that links textiles, sound and imagery to interpret a force in nature, and a body of work by two artists who present a time capsule shaped by recollections of adolescence.
Both exhibitions offer insight into the spirit of creativity through the exploration and interrogation of individual and shared experience and memory.
The Warwick Art Gallery is hosting “Morning Glory”, a collaborative installation that engages the senses and features works by textile artist Margaret Barnett, the composer Lawrence English, and photographer Al Sim.
The exhibition was inspired by the rare meteorological phenomenon, the Morning Glory cloud formation that attracts international visitors to Burketown, Queensland each year.
The roiling roll of cloud can be over a thousand kilometres long and a couple of kilometres high but it hovers only a hundred to two hundred metres above the ground.
Sim, who is also a glider pilot, has “surfed” this turbulent cloud wave formation photographing its movement against the dramatic aerial perspective of the Gulf Savannah area of Carpentaria.
His video, “Inspiration,” establishes a context for Barnett’s swathes of tremulous fabrics suspended from the gallery ceiling.
Barnett too has glided over this eerie cloudscape and has translated her experience into Shibori dyed fabrics that shape an almost three dimensional response to the spectacular roll clouds.
Other works using natural dyes such as mud, tea, and henna show glimpses of arid earth, river beds, eroded roots, and muddy tracks.
Wrapped around the visual imagery is the soundscape developed by Lawrence English. Environmental sound becomes a fourth dimension, a music of the spheres that hones visual perception and makes listening an interactive art form.
The Crow’s Nest Regional Gallery is featuring “Oh Happy Days” an exhibition by Jane Hodge and Christene Just.
The artists grew up in the post war 50s and 60s of Southeast Queensland, a period of rejuvenation in which the damaged souls returning from the battlefields had rebuilt their family structures and lots of new babies held a promise for the future.
For the adolescent it was a time of halcyon days, happiness, beach holidays, cute boys, pretty girls, ice-cream sodas, and the grown- up delight of cappuccino coffee.
The Beatles, mod fashion, miniskirts, and Morris minis reflected the popular culture.
Christene Just has used today’s technology to produce a series of digital paintings in bold homage to these iconic entities.
Particularly fascinating is her installation, “Chairs and Stools“in which a myriad of champagne muselets, each with a tiny portrait on the cap, symbolise the increased number of children in school.
Jayne Hodge’s luscious paintings create less literal imagery. Emotion and memory become abstract expressions of time and place. Shape, colour, and loose painterly gestures eloquently capture mood and moment.