‘‘Studio Gleaning’’, Hullabaloo Artists
(Hullabaloo Art Space, Cromwell)
IN their collective exhibition ‘‘Studio Gleaning’’, the Hullabaloo artists have pulled hidden gems from their home studios, bringing together works old and new in a fascinating miscellany of styles and media. Many have an enjoyable lighter note, a palpable joy, such as the animal paintings of Lizzie Carruthers, with their thick, textural paint application and quirky anthropomorphic details — a smoking panda, a sheep in his black singlet, a rooster calmly decked out in his cowboy hat. Carruthers’ work is often tongueincheek, with a piquant sense of humour and a warm empathy for her furred and feathered subjects.
Gail de Jong’s Winterlight perfectly articulates the sensory experience of winter in a vast, sprawling land, as the weak sunlight struggles to cast its rays across frozen hills and deep, dark waters.
With a paredback palette, Lorraine Higgins’ circular Central Sky is a dreamy, misty landscape. With streaks of light just breaking through encompassing cloud, the overcast sky is reflected in the calm stretch of lake below. Every brushstroke blends gently into another, creating the haziness of a memory or a view obscured by rain.
Andi Regan’s cabletie sculptures are always ingenious, and particularly so here in the delicate loops and twists of her
Corals and Pods. However, diverging from manmade materials to those of the natural world, Reclaim is equally striking. Like a timber patchwork quilt, squares of wood are coloured, carved and patterned, turning extraneous objects into something unique and beautiful.