Gina Kalabishis’s latest paintings seek to convey a romantic experience of landscape. Inspired by her recent Gang Gang Artist Residency on the NSW south coast, and time spent camping at Banksia Bluff on Victoria’s wild east coast, her images capture those sublime moments in time and mind when one directly encounters the uncontrollable power, unpredictability and cataclysmic extremes of the natural world.
"I'm wanting these new images to trigger ideas that are at once nostalgic and also deeply, internally questioning. I've used a somewhat subdued palette of pinks, blues and oranges to suggest the visual quality of a faded memory, of an experience that is now detached from reality or the sun damaged quality of printed images from the 50s and 60s. For me these colours also possess a kind of romantic character that make me think about the role romanticism might have to play in the 21st century as well as the possibility of rewriting of the history of female landscape painting. Does gender influence our view of nature and if so, can we avert future environmental catastrophes through a new, more attentive way of understanding our relationship to landscape?" Artist Statement 2023
RomanticaCatalogue essay by Marguerite Brown (MA ArtCur) 2023 When Gina Kalabishis goes walking in the bush, occasionally she encounters a “space of awe”i that literally stops her in her tracks. Most of us can relate to being unexpectedly awestruck by the light, atmosphere, and sheer ebullient glory of the natural world. It takes you away from your thoughts – the busy shopping list of your life administration; the email to be sent, the phone call to return. Certain moments remind us we are part of something infinitely bigger than ourselves. This is the space of awe that Kalabishis seeks to evoke in this new body of work Romantica.
Most of the paintings in Romantica are inspired by time spent on Yuin country at the bushland Gang Gang Residency on the south coast of NSW, where she was artist in residence in 2021. Other works feature scenes taken from Cape Conran Coastal Park along Victoria’s far east wilderness coast. Both places hold personal significance for Kalabishis, having spent numerous summers on family camping trips at Cape Conran, and being moved by the unique history and stunning wilderness of Umbi Gumbi, a 100 acre property and co-operative where the Gang Gang Residency is situated.
Just as humans will never lose the innate desire to commune with the natural world, artists will forever imbue representations of nature with emotional resonance. As the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1846, “Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling.” Kalabishis’ work has long been dedicated to the realm of feeling, or one feeling in particular – love. She compares the experience of nature’s sublime beauty with falling in love. This heady subject matter is developed in earlier works through her fusion of ikebana inspired still life arrangements with atmospheric landscapes.
In Romantica the hovering still life arrangements have gone, and the artist’s eye turns to the understory of the bush. Here the tangled vegetation of the forest floor carries the blackened scars of recent bushfires, dramatically cast against slivery green foliage and in many works punctuated by explosions of orange flowers. While bushfire has always been a part of the Australian experience, today imagery of burnt scrub carries with it a potent environmental message as climate change brings an escalation of these natural disasters. Celebrating the beauty of a place can act as a passive plea for protection, and these works are no exception.
In one of the major works, ‘If I didn’t have your love (after Leonard Cohen)' an impenetrable melange of ferns, banksias and other vegetation consume the picture plane. Pale areas of mist rise alongside dark pockets of shadow creating an atmospheric space ripe with mystery. This work showcases the artist’s seductive palette of red, blue, purple and grey that is carried throughout the exhibition. It also features the quintessentially hardy native banksia tree that populate many works. Banksia’s tough cones are adapted to release seeds in response to bushfires, and here they serve as a reminder of the capacity of life to flourish even in the most hostile environment.
One can glean metaphoric associations that mirror personal relationships in these new paintings. Kalabishis depicts the space after a calamity, when the firestorm has passed. But instead of desolation she finds wonder, wresting beauty out of the chaos and with it an enduring promise of new life. i Gina Kalabishis, in conversation with the author 10th February 2023
Listen to Gina's Spotify playlistPaintings - Love - Music
ARTIST BIO: Gina Kalabishis holds both a Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) and a Post Graduate Diploma of Visual Arts from the Victorian College of the Arts. She has exhibited extensively and has been the recipient of a number of prestigious awards including the Eutick Memorial Still Life Award (2017), the People’s Choice Award for the Bayside Acquisitive Art Prize (2017), the People’s Choice Award for the Bruny Island Art Prize (2016) and was the winner of the Rick Amor Drawing Prize (2014). Most recently she has been a finalist in the John Leslie Art Prize (2020, 2018), the ROI Art Prize (2019), the Kedumba Drawing Award (2016), the Eutick Still Life Award (2014), and the Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing (2014).
In 2022 Shoalhaven Regional Gallery exhibited a retrospective solo exhibition of Kalabishis' practice entitled Memento - Pictures of you (after The Cure). In 2019 she exhibited at Wayne State University, Detroit in THIS LAND IS…, a group exhibition addressing current and future environmental concerns. In 2017 she exhibited in the group exhibition Verdant Garden at Bundoora Homestead Art Centre and was also included in a group exhibition Romancing the Skull at the Art Gallery of Ballarat in the same year.
Her work has been featured in the award winning publication NATIVE: Art and Design with Australian Plants, written by Kate Herd and Jela Ivankovic-Waters (published by Thames & Hudson). In 2020 she was awarded a residency at NG Art Creative Residency Eygalières, Provence, Southern France and in 2021 undertook an Artist in Residence at Umbi Gumbi in Cuttagee, NSW. In both 2016 and 2017 Kalabishis was Artist Residence at the Bundanon Trust Studios, Illaroo NSW.
Her work is represented in major collections including the National Gallery of Australia and Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale. She has featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Australia, Spain, Asia and America.
