Solo Exhibition
26 June – 20 July 2024
OPENING EVENT – Friday 28 June from 5:30pm
Guest Speaker Caine Chennatt – Director, Curatorial & Cultural Collections, University of Tasmania.
Despard Gallery is proud to host solo exhibition Could You Ever Know Every Fold In The Mountain? by early career Tasmanian artist Zoe Grey.
Through painting, drawing and ceramics, Grey has put together a multi-layered new body of work that reflects on recent artist residencies on the Norwegian islands of Svalbard and Lofoten, including how learned knowledge derived from these profound new experiences inform deeper understanding of places that are familiar and personally significant. This includes Grey’s life-long connection held with the rugged rocks, fierce winds and booming swell of Marrawah, a remote coastal community on the northwest edge of Tasmania, where she grew up.
From her studio in Nipaluna/Hobart, Grey works intuitively, each composition built up through a combination of bold painterly gestures, blocks of colour and considered mark-making, using abstraction to deliberately push the conventions of landscape painting. At the heart of Grey’s practice is using paint to better understand the complexities behind personal bonds to place and how it can play a key role in defining identity, visually describing how these felt relationships peak and fade.
Her fourth solo exhibition with Despard Gallery, Could You Ever Know Every Fold In The Mountain? captures how not only we experiences the landscape, but how it plays a key role in defining identity. Through these bold abstracted landscapes, Grey uses paint to visualise the sensations, ambience and textures that define her experiences of place, and in doing so, nurture and preserve her emotional tethers.
With work that is both sensitive, yet raw and honest, Grey’s exhibition contributes to the evolving conversation around our post-colonial relationship to the landscape, questioning how new connections to place can be made through experiences of significance but can also help to cement those that are most valued.
Artist in Conversation
Listen to a special Artist In Conversation featuring early career Tasmanian artist Zoe Grey, held at
Despard Gallery to celebrate the final day of her recent solo exhibition Could You Ever Know Every Fold In The Mountain?
Listen to Grey discuss the ideas and motivations behind her new body of work, reflecting on artist residencies undertaken in Norway and how these experiences have influenced her practice, as well as build new perspectives around the interpretation of the Tasmanian landscape. Grey describes her special bond with Marrawah, a remote coastal community on the northwest edge of Tasmania where she grew up and how this unique place continues to be a driving force behind her practice.
Saturday 20 July 2024 – 11am
