Margaret Ackland continues to delight audiences with her witty, insightful and often intricate watercolours. For her current exhibition Ackland turns her gaze away from the daily news headlines and inward, toward more private moments of interiority. Capturing the forms and textures of domestic life, her masterful watercolours hum with visual energy and refracted possibilities.
Balancing ActCatalogue essay by Phe Luxford, 2022
Navigating the last few tumultuous years has been challenging to say the least, and for many the experience has been deeply unsettling. Working from the confines of her Sydney apartment artist Margaret Ackland used the extended periods of social isolation and rippling undercurrents of shared anxiety to quietly create a series of small playfully metaphoric still lives. Constructed from an unruly collection of silverware and crystal, with the occasional piece of fruit or flower picked from her balcony, the resulting series of jewel-like watercolours are distilled with a delicate and surprisingly vivid energy.
With humour and patience Ackland spent her time carefully arranging an assortment of jugs, vases, teapots and bowls into unlikely combinations. “The stacking was precarious, with lots of attempts and many tumbles. Achieving balance was often tricky” she says. Within the vitality of her actions, through the chaos and clamour that ensued if her compositions fell over, Ackland has managed to articulate something of the unpredictable nature of the lived experience. Channelling personal apprehensions into these unstable arrangements, she gracefully transforms agitation into awareness. For her “each painting is a small contemplation of the uncertainty of both life and perception, especially in these precarious times”.
Looking into these loose vibrant watercolours; playfully busy, full of bold colouration and graphic complexity, they present us with a dizzying level of detail. Everything is in focus, bathed in a clear light that bends and bounces off the shining, reflective surfaces of her forms. Like little visual puzzles they invite us to peer through the distortions of glass and water and to register the warping curvature of silver. Our eyes trace the folding contours of the striped fabrics used as backdrops and watch their reflections ricochet around the picture plane. There seems always more to be observed, and we are taken into the artist’s own experience of perceiving. “The prolonged looking at every stage reveals lots of detail that is unexpected or went unnoticed in early stages” says Ackland of her own engagement with these images.
The clarity and elegance of her observations are imbued with an aura of absolute calm, despite the instability of her subjects. It is an aura which seeks to establish harmony through private, focused activity. This poised equilibrium between inward and external experiences, of the domestic and the restless, pervades her compositions and alludes to a deeply subjective experience. Zooming into the fluid tones of glass and metal, a surprising series of self portraits emerge. As with the convex mirrors employed by the Dutch masters, Ackland has inserted herself within these still lives. Each viewed from slightly different perspectives, and with their own unique element of distortion or clarity, a multitude of selves have been revealed, each inhabiting a different plane of being. Housed within one small reflection we can observe the room in which she sits, the weather in the sky outside, the dress she wears. All these details about a single moment have been captured within the unassuming surfaces of her tableware.
The intensity of recent events has exposed the way emotional states can impact our understanding of the world around us. Ackland’s works ask us to interrogate that process of perception. Capturing multiple reflections of moments at once anxious and poignant, this exhibition highlights the transient yet powerful nature of our sensibilities and the very real challenge of keeping daily life in balance.
ARTIST PROFILE:Margaret Ackland has been a finalist in the Salon Des Refuse (2020), the Hazelhurst Art on Paper Award (2021, 2019), the Gallipoli Prize (2014), the Blake Prize (2012, 2008, 2007) and the Portia Geach Portrait Prize (2021, 2004). Her work has been featured in Italian Vogue and on ABC TV's Compass Series. In 2012 she was included in Not the Way Home: 13 Artists Paint the Desert, a group expedition organised by Artist Profile Magazine and exhibited at the National Trust S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney. In 2016 Ackland held a major regional solo exhibition of The Watercolour News at the Gippsland Art Gallery in Sale. Most recently Ackland was commissioned to create a major work for the new Inter Continental Hotel in Bangladesh, the country's first major international hotel. Ackland's work is represented in a range of national collections including Artbank, the Holmes a Court Collection and Deakin University.
