Line & Weight

Artist Biography in brief: Terri Brooks studied at RMIT and in 2010 graduated with a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Ballarat. In 2014 Brooks exhibited in Direction Now, a major group exhibition staged at Port Macquarie’s Glasshouse Regional Gallery, responding to the Direction 1 exhibition of 1956, the first exhibition in Australia to legitimise abstraction. In 2006 she participated in a government funded artist workshop in North East Germany and in 2009 was invited to exhibit at the State Gallery of Neubrandenburg, Berlin, officially opened by the Australian Embassy.

Brooks has held over twenty solo exhibitions and has participated in shows in the US, UK, Germany, Hong Kong and New Zealand. She has been selected several times as a finalist for the Fleurieu Art Prize and the Tattersall’s Landscape Art Prize, and finalist in the Kedumba Drawing Award and Alice Prize. She was awarded a BP Acquisitive Award in 1992 and an Australia Council Grant in 1991.  Her work is held in the collections of the Neubrandenburg Museum Germany,Macquarie Group Collection, Westpac Bank, Albert Tucker Collection, BHP Ltd and many other corporate collections, as well as numerous private collections in Australia, the United States, England, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Hong Kong. For over ten years her works have been sought by leading interior designers and architects to enhance exclusive and award winning interiors. 

Exploring the physicality of paint and surface textures, Terri Brooks formally investigates natural mark making. With a leanness of technique and an innate feeling for line and form, Brooks utilises her materials to produce rich and complex works that speak of creating art out of something humble and ordinary. 

Line and Weight, Artist Statement

‘I loved modern art as a child, I got it, embraced it and wanted to develop it.’

The body of small studies, larger paintings and paper works in ‘Line and Weight’ are ventures into my ongoing investigation of opposites or duality. In this case I have chosen to close the gap between black and white, pushing the boundaries to create soft whites, dark greys, ochres and creams.

The ‘line’ varies by brush weight or pressure and speed and transgressions from the true horizontal and vertical of the picture plain. The meaning of my work lies in the methodology and my choice of materials particularly evident in my painterly patterning and the employment of economy and directness intrinsic to the Australian tradition to ‘make do’. Natural environmental processes including weathering, architectural details and ‘found marks’ observed on surfaces in the city also inform the work. Each step of my painting process is intuitive and repetitive until the work is imbued with a sense of harmony and balance; a striving for ‘nonduality’ or oneness/allness.

Terri Brooks: Line and Weight Catalogue essay by Anna Dunnill

To paint on canvas is to engage with an inherently gridded form. Like all woven fabric, canvas is constructed from a network of perpendicular threads: warp (vertical) interlocked with weft (horizontal) in a repeating over-under pattern. Fastened around a standard rectangle, it sets the parameters of the surface: verticals and horizontals set at 90 degree angles. Binary systems.

Throughout her multi-decade practice, artist Terri Brooks has used a process of intuitive layered mark-making to push these parameters apart and pull them back together, softening the grid’s hard angles into looser threads and earthy washes of colour.

In Line and Weight, Brooks has produced a sophisticated suite of paintings with clarity and depth. While sitting firmly in abstraction, her work is alive to its surroundings: it hints toward tree bark, stitching, textured cloth, scuff marks, architecture. Tactile things buried in the strata of memory.

For some works, like Brown Weave, 2019, the painting process is a lengthy one, taking perhaps five months and 40 or 50 layers; Brooks shows me the side of the canvas with its strata of paint to prove it. The resulting piece is far from weighed down, though. It undulates, its grid-lines extending off the picture plane. Chinks of light within the ‘weave’ reveal the layers underneath, the visible process of its making.

Brooks remembers her grandmother, who lived through the 1930s Great Depression, describing feats of ‘making do’. A few packing cases, for instance, might with some vision and ingenuity be turned into a lounge suite. In such times of necessity, the function of an object becomes fluid, its edges blurred; it contains the possibility of many forms.

This approach underscores Brooks’s practice. ‘Improvisation,’ she points out, ‘is the basis of making do.’ Pared down to the simplest form—the line—and a reduced palette that embraces the shades between black, white and brown, Line and Weight demonstrates the richness of Brooks’s repetitive painterly gesture, an ongoing improvisation as each mark responds to the one before. 

One work gestures further towards the make-do ethos. Flattened Package, 2018, was once a humble cardboard box; the three-dimensional grid of its original hollow form is squashed flat. Brooks likens it to ‘road detritus’ seen on frequent walks: ‘paper and cardboard run over, discarded and weathered.’ Flattened Package is an irreverent object: flat planes buckled, edges bulging, the grid thoroughly disrupted.

In her seminal 1979 essay ‘Grids’, Rosalind Krauss writes that ‘logically speaking, the grid extends, in all directions, to infinity’. The grid within an artwork is therefore ‘a tiny piece arbitrarily cropped from an infinitely larger fabric’. 1  The paintings in Line and Weight convey both this sense of the infinite spatial grid and, through the building up of layers, the infinite and repetitious nature of time. Washed over, painted across, re-written, line by line.

1 Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October 9, no. Summer, 1979 (1979): 50–64.