CAROLYN GOWDY’S SCRAPBOOK

Paintings, drawings, printworks, collage, sculpture, and mixed media explore the ongoing experience of life, past and present along with inspired possibilities for the future . .
Life is an adventure . . . life is a gift.

My art is not just a form of creative expression. It’s a form of exploration. It’s a way of being. I consider it my job, as an artist, to look for beauty, grace, magic, and wonder everywhere. This gives me a sense of purpose and helps keep me in touch with my gratitude for what is. It reminds me that the miracle of life is something to celebrate, document, and preserve. It helps me stay fresh, new, alive in the moment, awake to elements that might otherwise go unnoticed or forgotten. It helps me to accept and appreciate life on life’s terms, to find hidden treasure in both breakdowns and breakthroughs.

I am fascinated by the subject of consciousness, the ongoing experience of being alive and how this relates to the past, present, and future, of human beings being human on the planet. Humanity is most definitely a work in progress. It is important to keep learning and to ask questions.   I am continually in the process of developing wisdom, clarity, and discernment. I choose to align myself with love, light, grace, beauty, truth, magic, and humour as much as possible. I choose to be present, awake and in the now as much as possible and wherever I go. I really don’t want to miss a beat out of the extraordinary adventure that is life.

Recently I discovered a quote by Picasso which particularly resonates ….‘The meaning of life is to find your gift and the purpose of life is to give it away.’

Carolyn Gowdy

Through the use of drawing, painting, intricate patterns and interconnected lines, I create an idealised space that becomes a stage set for contemporary plays. These plays are built upon a structure of personal experiences, memory, observation and cinematic references. It is narrated from the view point of a group of re-occuring motifs – female protagonists who are in – meshed, and joined one by one, rather like a mosaic. these girls are knotted and patched together by braided hair and are stitched in at the waist like siamese twins referencing patchwork quilts from the 1800s. The girls gather together in a setting of an almost idealised past – where time has ceased to move on and they hover tangibly between elements of observational and imaginative line work. Here the women begin to conceive life as a fabric of relations and they look at the latent structure that rules them. Recently this structure has been built upon themes of sexuality, religion, religious folklore, female hysteria, and the rituals that women out of hope and longing adorn. These ceremonial rites include rituals from the past – such as only being allowed to cut your hair on the day a full moon falls, or ancient fertility rituals. I compare these to the modern day ceremonies that have been fostered in our hyper – sexualised, instagramable world and I hope to give a glimmering insight into the mounting tension and the unwholesome intensity of what the imprisonment of being a girl really is.

The women profiled in the works will all hail from different walks of life and social class and so I feel the paintings will create a sense of belonging, they will construct a narrative about journey, spirit and how women become inextricably linked.

Exhibitions at Gallery 286

• 2018
• 2016

Landscapes & Interiors

Daniel Shadbolt & Jessica Biggs

Exhibitions at Gallery 286

• 2022
• 2018

Landscapes & Interiors

Daniel Shadbolt & Jessica Biggs

Exhibitions at Gallery 286

• 2022
• 2018
• 2016
• 2014

Holography is best known for its uncanny ability to record and display three-dimensional objects. Holograms attract, intrigue, excite and confuse us. They offer another way of viewing the objects around us, and it is unsurprising that this complex optical process attracted artists, almost as soon as it became viable as an imaging process, in the 1960’s.

Although many have embraced the hi-fidelity recording opportunities, a range of artists have also attempted to extend the process as a medium for manipulating (sculpting) light and as a methodology which allows the release of marks from the surface of the picture plane – to ‘draw’ in space.

This exhibition, curated by Andrew Pepper, attempts to explore how artists have examined and exploited the luminous, unsupported, mark, both physically and conceptually. It draws work from the extensive Jonathan Ross holography collection, which has been acquiring a breadth of approaches to the medium from artists for 40 years.

This group exhibition brings together, for the first time, a diverse range of internationally renowned artists who research, exploit, usurp and define the Unsupported Mark.

Installation Views

To complement the ‘drawing’ exhibition a selection of black and while photographs, from the collection, will be included in the red gallery.

I work with physical and perceptual phenomena intending to communicate directly and intuitively with my audience. The essential reason to be of each piece is usually a comparative functional relationship between constrained elements. An embedded concept like a physical muscle or the workings of a machine. The roots of this flow consistently from work done over many years. A piece is a nexus of constrained phenomena anchored by a passion for colour, light and movement.

I like to think that I work upon the visual perceptual frontier and with each successive piece I extend that frontier. Once I have a decisive worthwhile concept I need to construct the piece to see what will happen. Each piece is an experiment. I like to think what I make is to a degree absolutist and a clear statement of often simple phenomena. I am not seeking a social context or comment or to illustrate a political posture. I am seeking with each successive piece a clear step forward to extend the frontier of visual passion and experience.

Andrew Ryder 2018

Exhibitions at Gallery 286

• 2018
• 2016
• 2015
• 2013
• 2008
• 2006

Images of work from Andrew Ryder’s collection

Matt Gee’s exhibition Lustre explores the artist’s mission to subvert and imitate phenomena that arise from humankind’s long-term traces on the environment.

The viewer is presented with a range of mixed-media artworks incorporating a variety of glazes, shimmers and glows associated with natural phenomena such as volcanic rock, pyrite and crystals, but also urban materials such as spray paint, imitation gold and fired clay. The show is ultimately based on a new geological epoch known as Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene age signifies the beginning of significant human impact on the earths geology and, conceptually for the purpose of this exhibition, it is used to articulate a moment where objects become indistinguishable as either natural or artificial.

The epitome of this is Plasticglomerate, a tragic, yet fascinating symbol of the extent to which human intervention has become embedded in the natural world. This rock consists of sedimentary grains and lava, and is held together by molten plastic. It is formed from excessive levels of plastic being washed up on the beach and melting into lava streams, and because the plastic is not biodegradable it can even become fossilized, leaving behind a legacy of waste.

In a series of 24 cyanotypes, various pieces of Plasticglomerate, ‘Detroit Agate’, have become generically unified with images of studio sculptures and crystal growing projects. Negatives of all of these are laid on paper laced with a photosensitive mix of ammonium iron(III) citrate and potassium ferricyanide, and then exposed to sunlight, creating a synonymous portrayal of both studio based projects, and objects resulting from the Anthropocene.

Pyrite and Geodes are a recurring motif for imitation in this exhibition. Pyrite is labeled by society as ‘Fools gold’ and acts as the fake gold at Legoland. One might wonder why should a mineral be categorised as a substitute when it is an alluring natural material in its own right? Matt Gee sees geodes, with their modest appearance on the outside, and sparkly insides as a metaphor for a chance encounter, or a symbolic subversion of society’s cliché: Style over Substance.

Gee creates his Glazed Ceramic Geodes by firing clay to a temperature of 1200 degrees, a heat reminiscent of the actual volcanic lava which creates cavities in which natural geodes form. The fired clay shells are then encrusted with Copper Sulfate which, left to grow in a controlled studio environment sheltered from the elements, develops crystals upon the sculptures’ surfaces in a simulation of the natural process.

In this exhibition, Matt Gee continues to explore issues and materials previously encountered in his 2015 exhibition, Nutri-Artifice, at Gallery 286, with the addition of ceramic and pre-digital photographic elements to his practice. The results are both intellectually stimulating and visually seductive.

Exhibitions at Gallery 286

• 2017
• 2015