20 September – 14 October 2023
Despard Gallery is proud to host Blue Honey, solo exhibition by emerging Tasmanian painter Maggie Jeffries. In her second solo exhibition with Despard Gallery, Jeffries has created a new suite of botanical based paintings that reflects an ongoing investigation into how memories are developed through experience, using paint to recall places of meaning. For Jeffries, plants and flowers form a tether to sites of significance, prompting an emotional response through a sense of awe and wonder. Each compositions portrays these subjects larger than life, opening an intricate world of magnified beauty and childhood curiosity. Within each work, Jeffries has captured the intimacy of realism combined with the freedom of a more intuitive approach, allowing the delicate beauty of her subject matter to evoke ideas around transience and mortality, whilst simultaneously, a sense of growth, renewal and binding connections.
Jeffries was awarded a Bachelor of Arts and Fine Arts from the University of Tasmania in 2020, majoring in psychology and painting. The same year, Jeffries received an artist fellowship to visit and work for Creative Growth, an organisation working with artists with disabilities in California, USA. For the past three years, Jeffries has contributed to the City of Hobart Ability to Create annual exhibition, which celebrates diversity and showcases artists with all abilities, collaborating on installations and individual artworks. Jeffries was selected as a recipient of the King Island residency, preceding her inaugural solo exhibition All The Pearls in 2021. After completing her Honours in Painting at the School of Creative Arts and Media in 2022, Jeffries was selected for the Rosamond McCulloch studio residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris as well as the Country Glover residency at Patterdale, lutruwita/Tasmania.
Click here to register your interest for Maggie Jeffries.
This project was assisted through Arts Tasmania by the Minister for the Arts.