Trees + Terry Martin, Zina Burloiu, Sue Cochrane, Malcolm Pettigrove @Bungendore Woodwork Gallery

Some artists create unique niches through their skills and creativity. The current exhibition at Bungendore Woodwork Gallery features four artists with a connection to trees – two work with trees as material and two with trees as subject

Terry Martin makes trees through carving wood in ways that utilise the grain and texture of the wood to its most creative beauty. His work also includes lots of bowls made with remarkable choices of varied coloured timbers and design.

Zina Burloiu creates functional objects out of wood. The design and artistic creativity woven into her work takes her objets to a higher plane. A simple spoon is turned into an object of striking beauty. There is a set of exquisitely crafted spinning tops some with colourful interlay.

Malcolm Pettigrove works in pen and ink. His tree based creations have been influenced by some Chinese ink drawing traditions. Like the Chinese ink traditions the drawings skate between reality and something that is an art creation. A tree with its roots out of the groundis an example.

Sue Cochrane is an artist with great sense of australian landscape and vegetation. Apparently her favourite area is the east and south Gippsland and its look is in the pictures.

Remnant – Rebecca Worth @ Photoaccess Huw Davies Gallery

The photographic work of Rebecca Worth on display in the Huw Davies Gallery during November reminded the viewers of Rorschach blot tests. Rebecca Worth created striking images by bringing common everyday images that were woven into semi symmetrical photo montages that have the indefinite look of the test blot.

The images are produced in black and white and in the exhibition have elements that repeat across the set of images and Worth flips images and inverts them to establish the indistinct initial look that draws you in to search out the details.

Below is the gallery sheet material.

Pop – Kon Kudo @ Photoaccess Huw Davies Gallery

This work was fun. Kon Kudo is using a simple mechanical device to play with our short attention spans induced by modern technology. A collection of cards linked together on something that works like a bicycle chain that when watched from an end supplied the viewer with a constantly changing and developing set of images. It is somewhat like the frames of a film or one of those flicker cartoon books.

I loved it in that the viewer had some control and could interact with the artwork in various ways. The gallery material is supplied below.

 

Ellen Hewitt – The Death’s Maiden – @ Photoaccess Huw Davies Gallery

The blurb for the exhibition of work by Ellen Hewitt says: Humanity’s attempts to understand death and existence have generated a rich accumulation of abstractand creative thought…. The Death’s Maiden is an ethereal body of work that explores humanity’s relationship with mortality”

The images are layered and integrate many images that bring the mind to matters of death. There are faces, fans, skulls flowers and other shimery elements.

The gallery sheet is below.

 

 

 

What’s in the toybox? @ Goulburn Regional Art Gallery

27 November – 24 December 2015

The Goulburn Regional Art Gallery has a great exhibition right now featuring lots of fascinating creative toys. Within the mix there are gorgeous hand crafted wooden toys like trucks, cars and caravans. There is a remarkable toy box filled with creations of large toys made from pieces of other toys. There are dolls houses and set up scaled rooms. Two mirrored works centre around transparent skate boards and contrast with some spectacular richly coloured creations. The exhibition combines traditional toys, with vibrant creative works. There is a great set of fun works which is what toys and play is all about.

The website and blurb

http://www.grag.com.au/site/exhibition.php?id=108

Below is a selection of pics togive you an idea of the look of the exhibition.

 

Harriet Mitchell – Recent works @ Canberra Boys Grammar School Gallery

The Boys Grammar School in Red Hill has a gallery. I have tried to find it before with no succes. This time a parent watching cricket joined me in a quest to find it and after some wanderings we found it. The exhibition at present is of recent works created by Harriet Mitchell.

Harriet does remarkable work with hens and humans. She gets human’s pained faces in striking ways. Looking at her work you get a real sense she watches people’s eyes and how expressive they are. This exhibition was lots of fun and there some sample pictures below.

St Peter and Paul’s @ Goulburn

We went int an attractive church building in Goulburn last week. It was a beautiful stone structure that was built in the 1870s. The entry foyer is a low ceilinged timber structure from which you enter into the main space. What a contrast? The main building is a large a frame shaped space with massive stained glass windows celebrating Christian leaders of the past. There is a gorgeous pipe organ, three altars and a great set of the 14 stations of the cross, carved in white and surrounded by darker stone like frames.

There is for me an ambivalence toward this type of building. While they were built as an acknowledgement of the glory of God the resulting space now is cold and dark even in high summer in the middle of the day. I was not there for a church meeting but if there is not a large number of people I suspect there would quickly be a sense of isolation in such an enormous space.

The thing I loved most about the space was the remarkable artistry of the glass and the stations. At home I found the church has a website that takes you through the history and restoration work involved in the building.

The website and some pics below

http://www.stspeterandpaulsoldcathedral.org/

 

Behind the Lines 2015 @ Museum of Australian Democracy

The annual marvelous exhibition of the best of Australian political cartoons has opened at the Museum of Australian Democracy. These creatives always inspire entertain and educate. The curators lay them out in subject areas to show both the different takes and the similarities that flow through the artists. The magic of cartoons is they combine humour and confrontation, They expose absurdity and poke holes in hubris.

The exhibition now is housed in the lower square of corridors under Kings Hall in the Old Parliament House. It is put up and left up for the year and so I often pop in for revisits.

There is a book for purchase and the website below has all the cartoons in their subject categories.

http://behindthelines.moadoph.gov.au/2015

I have a couple of pics below for my own records but the website is better.

 

Tom Roberts @ National Gallery of Australia

People of my generation know Tom Roberts works.  His big works grace the walls of all the major Galleries in Australia and have been reproduced ad nauseam. So what led me to turn up and fork out $20 to see the new Tom Roberts exhibition on the first weekend at the National Gallery of Australia? The word is retrospective. I have been amazed by the powerful increase in understanding I have gained through viewing a good retrospective exhibition of an artist. (The Williams one  a few years ago had me in tears)

This show gives you the sense of the scale of Roberts’ work and how comprehensively he has defined how we think of parts of our history and its representation. It includes many unfamiliar aspects of his work. I had not seen his indigenous studies but it also does a great job of bringing together in one space the defining works of the man’s life – shearing shed stuff, the opening of parliament, and the many grand bush landscape pictures.

I enjoyed it so much I will probably go back to see it again over the next few months that it is on.

 

 

Ros Paton – Lamina @ Belconnen Arts Centre

Lamina explores the decay that constantly occurs in our society in the forms all around us. Weeds and wear an tear are an integral part of our world. Paton’s art uses materials that look like dilapidated lino, all wonderfully familiar but all stir the replace and renovate instincts in the viewer. Other items are pictures of mixed media paving that combine many types of surfaces as change has been imposed over time. I loved Paton’s work because it made its point in a happy way with materials I have long been absorbed in and enjoy in the world around me.

Pictures below.