Wild – Outside and Within
5 October 2019 – 26 January 2020
Despard Gallery is pleased to share Penny Burnett’s upcoming exhibition at the Wilderness Gallery located at Tasmania’s iconic Cradle Mountain. This exhibition has stemmed from an arts residency at Cradle Mountain that Penny undertook in mid 2019. Penny will be presenting a new body of work that is inspired by the untouched wilderness of Cradle mountain, continuing her painterly exploration of the botanical within the landscape as a way to reveal our universal curiosity towards natures hidden powers.
“When does an environment shift from being a vista, something we look at, to something visceral, something that moves us within? Here at Cradle Mountain Wilderness Gallery and Studio, I resolved to be quite immediate and unedited in my painting approach. I walked each day regardless of the mountains mood and endeavoured to capture that experience in situ. This quest became problematic. How do you paint the howling wind with needle sharp snow pelting your face? Or the song of a currawong as it serenades the suns arrival and departure? Or the foreboding sensation that the trees are watching you, whispering mysteries of survival way-to selfless to understand?
Wild – Outside and Within is a dance between painterly figuration and abstraction within landscape painting. Through the application of paint, I have endeavoured to suspend the vulnerability and wonder of those sensations by bringing resonance to the imagery that is raw, basic, and instinctual. In some works, the materiality and chemical elements of the medium, in particular the pigment of the paint, is exposed in order to resonate with the minerals of the earth: ochre, copper, oxides and cadmium, this linkage is visceral rather than cognitive. In this exhibition, the works oscillate between the two, some are Wild – Outside, the vista and some more abstract, Within.”
Wilderness Gallery
718 Cradle Mountain Rd, Cradle Mountain TAS 7306
Exhibition Preview..
