6 – 30 March 2024
Despard Gallery is proud to present a special curated curated exhibition featuring seven contemporary Tasmanian practitioners. The exhibition groups together multi-generational, emerging and early career Tasmanian women artists all exploring a diverse range of mediums, including painting, sculpture, drawing and ceramics. Artists include Katie Barron, Keryn Fountain, Kirsty Riddle, Maggie Jeffries, Rosanagh May, Sophie Witter & Zoe Grey.
Each artist explores some of their favourite inspirations, including the ocean, gardens, objects, music and the built environment, whilst contemplating the possibilities of our relationship with these worlds to question personal growth and circumstance. This includes making impressions of the environment around them through earthly materials. Channelling these personal connections into unique objects of art, each artist preserves a relationship with the landscape by reencountering and recording their changes.
Click here to register your interest for Contemporary Tasmanian Women Artists.
Embedded with a sense of playfulness and unreserved joy, each painting invites the viewer to reassess the makeup of our everyday, specifically in around objects typically associated children’s play and confectionary. Through each work, Barron invites us to reconsider the significance of these objects and reengage with the enjoyment and delight that comes with childhood wonder.
In this suite of cast bronze vessels, I have used the visual motifs I see in the shapes, splits, twists, and textural overlays of tree bark to convey a speculative dialogue. The works are made using the traditional lost wax technique, with the metal capturing the fine details of nature’s organic forms, created to hover, and bend in contrast to the weight of the material and fragility of the bark.
The inspiration for this work centres around designing imaginary vessels that could be used as habitat for native birds in suburban areas. Actively making habitat for other species enriches our lives as well as the lives of our co-habitants on this planet. The series of ceramic plaques further explores the motifs of underground utilities and built environments.
A childlike curiosity of plants and their intricate details remains central to Jeffries’ painting practice, keeping her tethered to the remembered gardens and bushland of her childhood and other moments of significance. With an emphasis on light and translucency, compositions echo how memory is layered, complex and intertwined. It also suggests fragility and how it can slowly fade into abstraction.
To share music with another is one of my greatest joys, to be made aware of a song I’ve never heard, and instantly fall in love with, is the greatest gift. Adorned with imagery, lyrics and tens of thousands of dots, each vessel is an ode to the songs on Melanie and the magical, often bizarre, world she created with her music. They become a small reminder to hold space in our hearts for the things we treasure most.
This series of still life paintings works are inspired by objects from my studio. The use of colour and loose and expressive lines draw attention to the process of painting, that it is human, expressive, and imperfect. The titles of the works also reflect what I was contemplating at the time of painting and anchor the works in the everyday tensions of day-to-day life.
These drawings were made over a recent summer spent at home. They’re about the things I’ve always drawn as well as the things I’ve never noticed. They’re about considering a place an extension of yourself, but forever discovering newness in that familiarity.
