&Gallery - Scape Catalogue

From the Curator

Do you remember how old you were when you first noticed a horizon?

With children everything is a new discovery, so their focus is often short sighted and scattered. As we get older, and our geographic situation changes we begin to slow down and look, looking beyond to the horizon line and finally seeing what lies between.

Although paintings from the earliest ancient and Classical periods included natural scenic elements, landscape as an independent genre did not emerge in the Western tradition until the Renaissance in the 16th century. In the Eastern tradition, the genre can be traced back to 4th-century. However Aboriginal artist have been depicting aerial landscapes for over 40,000 years with early depictions of water holes and rivers on caves, in sand and of course on bark.

Today, landscapes continue to be a major theme in art with many artists using documentary techniques such as video, photography and classification processes to explore the ways we relate to the places we live in and to record the impact we have on the land and our environment.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the definition of landscape was challenged. The genre expanded to include urban and industrial landscapes, and artists began to use less traditional media in the creation of landscape works. For example in the 1960s land artists such as Richard Long radically changed the relationship between landscape and art by creating artworks directly within the landscape.

Our artists all look beyond and are creating landscapes within this long tradition. They help us see the landscape beyond the everyday, beyond our horizons.

In this exhibition we are focusing on the natural landscape with URBAN exhibition to follow.

Curator - Julie Collins

Kate Briscoe- Rock Face Reef - Kimberley - Detail

Bern Barry

Bern Barry grew up in a farming family in a community in the Mallee regions of country Victoria. While working in Canberra he attended a Summer School’s for art at the ANU. His passion for drawing and painting saw him doing many sketch of the Monaro region of New South Wales where he use to travel to as a child visit family in Cooma. It is this love of the countryside that he drives his inspiration and fuels his creativity. He now lives in the town of Glenlyon in Central Victoria, painting everyday and drawing from the beauty that surrounds him in that area.

“The paintings at & Gallery for this exhibition are inspired by the vista l see from my studio, the mist of a morning, the massive amount of rain we have had this year, watching the water find its own course in the paddocks surrounding me and my occasional trip to the city has inspired the ‘Traffic on the Bolte’.”

Bern Barry -Once a Walnut in Moonlight - Detail

Celia Dymond

Celia Dymond is a professional creative who has studied in photography and graphic design. All images are in camera. There is no use of any digital manipulation post production. Celia’s work is a statement around the immediacy of the impact of the social and digitisation. Her work is intentionally slow. Images can take over 25yrs to manifest. Working with expired film stocks, there is nothing fast about the photographic process.

She works with a range of cameras and 120 medium format film, recently exploring low tech pinhole cameras, allowing chance and risk to influence the end product by using methods which are unconventional. There is no digitisation or computer manipulation with my work practice. My only intent is to make a beautiful image from a flawed and faulty process.

“My series work explores edges where land meets water, movement of waves and clouds.”

She has recently started to explore inland works. Celia’s work is held in various collections around Australia.

Celia Dymond - Coast - Cape Otway - Detail

Phillip George

Phillip George has held 32 solo exhibitions and over 100 group exhibitions nationally and internationally. Exhibitions include the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art Greece, Art Tower Agora Athens, and Stills Gallery Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, National Gallery of Thailand, Bangkok, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore and National Gallery of Australia. His work draws connections between Australian beach culture and the fractured, turbulent zones of the Middle East.

His drawing in Water series is a departure from stationary one-eyed perception; here the combination of many pictures in the brain are orchestrated into different and fluid relational spatialities. It’s not a classical gaze inherited from Renaissance straight lines. The sea is a mirror that reflects and repeats our broken images. Its fluctuating surfaces can be feathered or quartzy, crimped and moiréed.

Kate Briscoe

Inspired by the ancient and weathered Australian landscape, Kate Briscoe mixes sand into paint to create eroded geological cross sections and striations that capture the substance and sensuality of the earth.

For Kate, landforms tell stories. Geological cross sections and sediment layers record past events, catastrophes, the shift and flow of elemental forces over time. Although these works reference the geology of specific areas across the continent-from Arnhem Land and The Kimberly to the South coast of NSW-they are essentially abstract improvisations of texture and colour that facilitate a rich visual experience for the viewer and convey the ‘essence’ of place.

Sarah Bell

“The next time you stand on the beach at night, watching the moon’s bright path across the water, and conscious of the moon-drawn tides, remember that the moon itself may have been born of a great tidal wave of earthly substance torn off into space.”

Rachel Carson. The Sea Around Us.

Sarah Bell lives and works from Balnarring on the Mornington Peninsula, Victoria. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Victorian College of the Arts and a Postgraduate Diploma of Education from Monash University. Bell has held four solo shows and participated in numerous group exhibitions. Her most recent body of work was launched in 2021, entitled ‘Life is but a Dream’. Bell was a finalist in the 2021 St. Kevin’s Art Award and 2022 Omnia Art Prize.

“My painting is framed by feelings of omnipotence in natural forces, weather changes and poetic landscapes. Its imagery is anchored in a reverence of the ever-changing atmospheric effects of water, sea and sky, the pull of the tides by the moon, and light, shape and forms affected by the weather and seasons. The work implies the nostalgia of a memory, a ‘reverie’ that elevates us above and into the landscape, sensing hope in the fragility of the luminous, physical and momentary. I explore nuance in blues and the contrasting pinpoints of lunar light reflecting on both water and clouds in the ‘nightscape’ without the noise of daylight. This is a theme that I have returned to often in my practice.”

“The work is largely an emotional and sensuous response to the natural environment around where I live and paint. Working from observation and memory through chalk drawings and miniature oil studies, I build the surface in gradual layers, sensing into a ‘slow painting’ process using a limited palette. Tapping into the kinaesthetic process of painting, I embody the landscape’s space and light as it unfolds in the painting. I hope to provoke the viewer to dream and imagine, or be transported via the senses, into gentle feeling states.”

Sarah Bell - Colour all Around Me - You and Us - Detail

Mark Stoner

Mark Stoner is a Melbourne based artist with work in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria and regional galleries. He has many large-scale public art installations including Docklands, Geelong Foreshore, Royal Botanic Gardens Cranbourne and Adelaide Airport. He has been a practicing artist for more than 40 years. For near on 30 years, he taught ceramics and sculpture at the Victorian College of the Arts. Since 2010 he has worked privately from his studio in Elwood.

Flow emerges from my life-long preoccupation with the movement of our world. My experiences of wind, water, landform, geology, maps and charts, the list can be endless. But simply put I love the curve of it all. The continual squirming and twisting.

Mark Stoner - Timeless - Detail