Despard Gallery is excited to present Night Citrus, the highly anticipated third solo exhibition by early career Tasmanian artist Maggie May Jeffries.
Underpinning Jeffries’ new suite of botanical based paintings is an intimate observation of details found in our natural world. Through exquisitely layered surfaces, each work traces Jeffries’ personal fascination with plants and flowers, recalling the sensation of personal experience through a shared sense of wonder. Magnifying each subject many times their original size, reveals an intricate world of unseen beauty and the awe of childhood curiosity.
Rich and complex, each meticulously rendered composition is assembled from numerous sources, symbolising how memory is collected through layers of experience and becomes entwined with personal awareness and perception, but can also slowly fade into abstraction. As such, Jeffries’ use of paint becomes a method of remembering, combining opaque and transparent layers to capture each texture and detail, as well as subtle shifts between light and shadow. Blending these various states together, Jeffries’ work conveys multiple ideas simultaneously, including a sense of fragility, transience and decay, yet also resilience, growth and renewal.