Despard Gallery is excited to host Turning Tides solo exhibition by established Tasmanian artist Todd Jenkins.
To celebrate this exhibition, we are hosting an Opening Event on Friday 29 April from 5:30pm, to be officially launched by Dr. Michael Nay, seasonal lecturer in painting at the School of Creative Arts and Media, University of Tasmania.
In his sixth major solo exhibition with Despard Gallery, Jenkins explores Tasmania’s unique coastal regions, reflecting on the biodiversity of our marine ecosystems. Jenkins’ work responds to the experience of exploring these areas firsthand, using paint to describe the shifting peritidal regions where the coast interacts with the sea across estuaries and tidal pools.
Through an intuitive based approach, Jenkins contrasts thinly layered veils of paint with bold impasto textures, building a surface that is dynamic and rich in depth and colour. As such, Jenkins creates compositions that appear to be in flux, visually expanding on natural forms that echo reality, evolving ever deeper into abstraction. With paintings that retain a trace of the artistic process, the arbitrary flow of paint becomes symbolic for a sense of discovery and the constant sense of wonder that nature provides through subtle nuances of light, colour and pattern. Through gestures that embody both marine organisms and topographical features, Jenkins’ paintings capture the multisensory experience of the Tasmanian shoreline, whilst simultaneously representing atmospheric changes and the passing of time.
