Ash Bolt
Newtown’s Boom Gallery is set to kick off its program for 2022, with two solo exhibitions opening next week.
Both Andrea Shaw’s ‘The In-Between’ and Amber Stokie’s ‘In The Studio’ exhibitions will open on Thursday and run until February 20.
Shaw, a paint and textile artist living in Torquay, has hosted five previous solo exhibitions in Melbourne and Geelong and is well known for her work creating window installations and wall murals for retail venues and galleries.
Her exhibition draws on her studies in landscape architecture and textile design, to highlight the relationships between colour, pattern, space and landscape.
“These works aim to capture some of what I perceive to exist within the landscape beyond my senses,” Shaw said.
“The spaces between the physical forms we can see and feel, be it energy or a matter humans are yet to trace.
“I wanted to show the link between my more representational landscape works and the move to abstraction in the one body of work. How one work informs the next, focusing on those spaces between the recognisable aspects to begin the process.
“This led me to paint and cut raw linen for a number of the works in this show. I wanted to create the surface to paint on using the initial landscape works as inspiration whilst letting the central theme of ‘what exists between?’ guide me.”
Stokie, an Adelaide-based artist that combines painting and drawing, said her exhibition explores the artist’s studio.
“Over the last 18 months I’ve had the opportunity to consider the nature of the artist’s studio both from my own changing situation, the fact that I have inhabited four different studios throughout this time and from the perspective of other artists who I have connected with on Instagram,” she said.
“This body of work explores my interest in the life of the artist and the studio as an active emotional and psychological space. Beginning with the decorative and practical objects that other artists shared with me from their own studios, this posed questions such as … how can I use paint to describe the emotional state of the artist? How do I describe the push/pull sensation of artistic life?
“As a starting point, each painting began with a loose description of an object or group of objects found in a studio. I’ve then added layers of oil paint and in some of the work, heavy directional marks to talk about the changing pace and the uncertainty often felt in the studio.
“Over the last 12 months I’ve had conversations with other artists about opposing feelings that are a part of artistic life such as elation and insecurity. This dichotomy is represented by various elements in the paintings including the use of night and day (‘Studio at Night’ works) and also inside and outside (‘Haven’ which is suggestive of the garden that surrounds my own studio).
“Expressive marks have in some works concealed the initial objects to a point they are barely recognisable, an intentional act to communicate a sense of overwhelm or intense feeling.
“Fleeting ideas and imaginative thought are represented by marks floating in the space of the canvas as depicted in the painting ‘Studio at Night – Panther’. Across all works not much is anchored alluding to the often-unstable nature of an artist’s life.”
Both exhibitions will have an opening celebration from 1-3pm on Saturday, January 29 at Boom Gallery in Rutland Street, Newtown.
