For this exhibition FLG has brought together the work of five artists; William Breen, Hobie Porter, Melanie McCollin-Walker, Ken Smith, Michael Simms, and guest artist Fiona Kent, to explore feelings of longing and memory of landscape while facing the collective challenge that has been Covid19.
The term Wanderlust has a fairly literal translation – expressing the desire to wander, and has its philosophical roots within German Romanticism’s notion of finding a sense of both the divine and the self via a personal connection with the natural world. The artists presented here each has a unique relationship with the landscapes that surround them, and within the context of our recent responses of the pandemic, each has had a very different experience of lock-downs and border closures. Most are based in regional areas, and while their ability to travel broadly was minimised they still had a local landscape with which they could commune each day. Others living in the urban environment felt the full force of being stuck within their metropolitan boundaries.
Each of the featured artists has found a unique pathway back to nature – some with crystal clear recollections of a place once visited, other with evocative depictions of sensations felt within place and time. All are united by a deeply immersive and wholly reverential homage to the landscape and its ability to nourish and calm in times of difficulty.
We are all finally able to travel once again, to more or less go where we want to, and be reunited with places and loved ones who have been far away - but the process is still tinged with uncertainty. The lightness that we previously took for granted, the ease with which a journey could be ventured into, is still complicated. Hopefully now we have all found some time to escape the four walls of our homes and have been able to venture out into those wide beautiful horizons that we longed for so much over the last two years. We hope that each of the glistening horizons presented here offers audiences a visual experience that is both curative and refreshing and in turn affirms the power of art to transcend difficulties, and to offer hope.
William Breen Staring out into the horizon, that point where sheets of land and sky meet at a single seam, is to contemplate a twofold landscape wider and deeper than the logic of a single moment. Within this coalescence of monolithic plate and atmospheric ether, an eternal, almost unfathomable experience of deep time greets our fleeting smallness. This vista of land, this orb, spins around a sun, and the changing colours and intensity of its light heralds the beginning and ending of each of our brief, earthbound days.
Pigment is laid down upon canvas in an attempt to speak to the evidence of this vast reality, to ground oneself within a framework of the world, and to bare witness to its beautiful happenstance. Victorian painter William Breen continues to explore the central theme of the landscape, a compulsion that has steadily driven his work to date. While his earlier landscapes are best known for their use of soft monotones, full of enveloping mist and haze, here Breen embraces light and air as a vehicle for expansive meditation, as a means to articulate an encounter with the sublime. (Excerpt from essay by Phe Luxford)
Hobie Porter
Something Gained, Something Lost
I live amongst the subtropical rainforest of North-Eastern NSW. The region has been declared a hotspot for its rich biodiversity, while ironically, it is also widely used for a range of agrarian monocultures. The region is a site of competing community interests and is something that provides a source of tension in my landscape paintings of my home environment.
Allusions to loss and transience tend to recur in my work. I have come to understand that these are subtle themes that help me to access a particular interpretation of the sublime in the landscape, at once both intimate and vast. I also like to work with dramatic contrasts in lighting while paying close attention to subtle shifts in colour and tonality. I am interested in the way these kinds of dichotomous points of interest can interact with and against each other.
Melanie McCollin-Walker I had an opportunity to kayak up the Pieman River on Tasmania's northwest coast, and it was here that I discovered the Savage River - an ancient river system of unparalleled beauty. It felt like a majestic outdoor cathedral. Moreover, I was intrigued by the inherent vulnerability I felt surrounded by this vast landscape. It is hard to quantify the instant connection I had with this unique place, but in some ways, I felt as though the river's journey mirrored my own. I was inspired by its strength and resilience, unwavering in the face of obstacles, forever flowing forward; its quiet reverie was humbling and awe-inspiring.
Ken Smith 'A reflection in a building by the sea' continues my visual investigation of man-made structures that have been built close to the interface between land and sea.
In this instance this image uses part of a building situated at the now redundant Quarantine Station at Point Nepean on the end of the Mornington Peninsula. This building was used as a waiting room for passengers arriving in Australia who had to first enter a time of quarantine because the ships on which they had travelled were found to be carrying infectious diseases. While revealing the history of both its construction and utility, this building is also a marker of stillness within an environment of constant transience. Its form, surfaces, and colours, and the way that daylight reacts with these qualities are all used in this painting to evoke the contrast between what is close and what is distant, between an awareness of the present and memories of the past, and between the actual and the imagined.
Michael Simms These works were created from a residency I completed at the Broken Hill Art Exchange in the first half of 2021. Ever since the pandemic began I’ve had a yearning to go back to Broken Hill to explore my family history - perhaps a response to the restricted movements and existential questions posed by these disorienting times. While drawing inspiration from the dramatic light and open skies in the outback, the works are also coloured by my childhood memories of visiting family, and the poignancy that comes with the passage of time. The sight of water in the region has always held a certain fascination - its scarcity giving it more impact when it appears. I felt a gravitational pull to places like the Menindee Lakes and the Umberumberka Reservoir depicted in these works, completing a series of small plein air studies during my residency. The opportunity to revisit these vast locations in my mind when creating these larger works from my studio in isolation has been transportive and powerful.
Guest Artist - Fiona Kent
During lockdown I longed to be again in faraway places, quiet places, and peaceful places. I missed seeing the morning light, the moonlight, the twilight, the changing light, and the sky’s light in the lands of our country. Painting this longing, painting the Australian light I so missed seeing, expressed my wanderlust during a difficult time for all, when we could only wander in our minds and hearts.
