A Path or Track Laid Down for Walking

Magali Gentric ·

Stockroom Kyneton, gallery two
02 April / 08 May 2022

GREG WOOD
A Path or Track Laid Down for Walking

This collection of paintings was all made from Wood’s Chewton property, where he and his family now live and work, having relocated from inner Melbourne in 2021. With Wood’s studio located alongside Forest Creek that flows alongside the Castlemaine Diggings National Heritage Track, these paintings give a sense of traversing through a landscape. The use of visual cues such as meandering paths, steep tracks, and expansive planes invites the viewer to follow their gaze through rocky outcrops, dense shrubs and expansive planes, to snatch peeks at distant mountaintops. Here, the air is heady, at times shrouding forms as if in a dense haze or fog seen through diffused light. The Dja Dja Wurrung People, the traditional owners and custodians of this land are very much present here.

As is characteristic of Wood’s atmospheric landscapes, these paths could also be anywhere. The use of paths and tracks as a way to be with and in the landscape characterises an ancient and more immediate, deep and real connection to our natural world, a world that was travelled through on foot. Walking in one’s local area also recalls our own recent collective experiences during lockdowns, where we were forced to be in the moment, noticing the details of our walking paths and their immediate surrounds.

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In Search Of Ordinary

Magali Gentric ·

Stockroom Kyneton, ceramic space
04 December 2021 / 09 January 2022

HONOR FREEMAN
In Search Of Ordinary

HONOR FREEMAN
Absorb, 2021, porcelain, gold lustre, 5 x 24 x 13cm
(photographer: Grant Hancock)

Honor Freeman’s practice reveals a careful observation of the domestic realm and the ordinariness of the everyday. The work conveys ideas of material transformation. The transmutation of common, unremarkable domestic objects into sculptures that belie their materiality and purpose – an ordinary alchemy.
Working primarily in porcelain, Freeman harnesses the mimetic qualities inherent in clay through the magic of slip casting. The works playfully interact with ideas of liquid-made solids. The porcelain casts echo the original objects; the liquid slip turns solid and becomes a memory of a past from a ghost object.

Honor Freeman is an artist living and working in the Fleurieu Peninsula on Ngarrindjeri land in South Australia, whose practice utilises the mimetic properties of porcelain, crafting objects that belie their materiality and purpose.
Freeman completed her studies in 2001 at the South Australian School of Art. Following graduation, Honor took up an Associate position and Tenant residency in the ceramics studio at Jam-Factory Craft & Design. Her work has been curated into major exhibitions at institutions throughout Australia, including the MCA, Tarrawarra Museum of Art, and The PowerHouse Museum. She has undertaken international residencies at Guldagergaard, Denmark’s International Ceramic Museum, and in the US at Indiana University’s School of Art & Design. In 2006 Freeman traveled to Chile to exhibit and participate in The South Project, continuing her project on/off/on, in-stalling porcelain light switches and powerpoints clandestinely in public spaces. In 2018 she was invited to undertake the Guildhouse Collections Project at the Art Gallery of South Australia, the outcome of this residency Ghost Objects, was exhibited in 2019 as part of SALA Festival.
Exhibiting since 2000, Honor’s work is held in numerous public collections including the NGV, Art Gallery of South Australia, ArtBank and Washington DC’s National Museum of Women in the Arts. Her works feature in the publication 101 Contemporary Australian Artists, published by the NGV, and the international publication Ceramics Masterclass: creative techniques of 100 great artists, by Louisa Taylor.

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To Dwell & Respond

Magali Gentric ·

Stockroom Kyneton, gallery Three
21 August / 03 October 2021

ROBYN PHELAN
To Dwell & Respond

Wood-fired ceramic sculptures made in correspondence with the landscape of the Tallarook Ranges.

To her Tallarook residency, Robyn Phelan brought an attentive eye, a responsive body, an open heart, and bags of commercial clay. Phelan found a dramatic natural setting and connected resonantly with the granite-rich landscape. The resulting sculptural forms are hard to name; they are elusively unknowable, as is her irreconcilable relationship to this land. However, the works are intimate and tangible sensations of Phelan’s experience of this place at this time.

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Scene Afar

Magali Gentric ·

Stockroom Kyneton, gallery one
08 February / 08 March 2020

GREG WOOD
Scene Afar

Greg Wood’s series Scene Afar is a reflective response to spaces that he has negotiated as an inhabitant, visitor and artist. They are considered abstracted renderings from both macro and micro observations. The work draws him to evocative sites of geography where recognition and contemplation inform landscape experience. Via the act of painting, these works recollect memory and trigger an interaction with locations and subsequent painterly responses.

Influenced by growing up amongst a family of artists, Greg Wood has been an active landscape painter since the mid-90s. This has enabled him to live for a period in Tasmania, travel to Vietnam and Japan and undertake a residency in Brussels. Wood's work has been included in several important Australian award exhibitions, including the John Glover, Tattersalls Prize, the Fleurieu Peninsula Biennale Art Prize and the Kate Derum Award. Wood’s work is part of important private and public collections, including the Joyce Nissan and Peter Mac Art Collections.

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Layered

Magali Gentric ·

Stockroom Kyneton, gallery two
09 November / 08 December 2019

KIM BARTER
Layered

Kim Barter draws inspiration from the landscape, observing and immersing herself in its power, beauty and fragility. Working from sketchbooks filled with drawings, paint splotches, rubbingsand notes, Barter’s gestural style evokes sensations of wonder, layered with colour, texture and line.

Barter’s mark-making stems from a process of intuition, her time in the studio a period of intense reflection and consideration. She begins working in a way that attempts to remove all the words and visual ‘reality’ of the landscape, searching for an unselfconscious response to share her feelings and thoughts. Her work serves as a reminder to herself and others of the beauty of Australia’s terrain.

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Found

Magali Gentric ·

Stockroom Kyneton, gallery two
10 September / 02 October 2016

KIM BARTER
Found

I believe that in our soul everything works together and we don’t

necessarily need to be conscious of the details. It’s about just being able to be in the moment. To accept that moment, to value it and trust it.

It is a most exciting experience to get out of my own way.

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Slow Release

Magali Gentric ·

Stockroom Kyneton, gallery one
09 April / 08 May 2016

GREG WOOD
Slow Release

In this series of paintings, Melbourne-based artist Greg Wood draws inspiration from collected imagery. Works ranging from large to miniature-scale, Wood presents the viewer with a collection of gestural and dream-like landscapes.

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Moonface

Magali Gentric ·

Stockroom Kyneton, gallery two
11 April / 31 May 2015

NICHOLAS IVES
MOONFACE

Some of Nicholas Ives’ thinking toward his painting and studio process is to do with the question of possibilities within the painting process and as a methodology.

Ives finds that incidents and experiences of painting(vb) articulate multiple possibilities for new lived realities. A painting is the mid-state of an event that operates as an experience with infinite divergence; ie, the instability of the painting process is a fluid reality that moves in the direction of the unlimited. The moment of painting is lived and defies abstraction as it is an experiential travel towards a multitude of moments, both past, future and side-by-side. Painting moments always open new painting moments and will disrupt previous painting moments. 

Ives likes thinking that these events of destabilisation, transformation and evolution, as well as decay, rupturing and loosening, reveal new manners, limitless spaces and openings and connections.

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A Drawing in of Landscape

Magali Gentric ·

Stockroom Kyneton, gallery two
14 February / 29 March 2015

KIM BARTER
A Drawing in of Landscape

 “I do my best work when I have the mental and emotional space to actually ‘be’ there. To be really present. Working in the bush, in deserts, by the sea and in the mountains, I can concentrate on what is central in the moment.

The environment is something I slowly begin to see in its completeness and majesty as well as in details, shapes, silhouettes, it’s patterns and rhythms. The contrasts and changes of mood between morning and evening light. Smells carried by winds, tracks and markings show endless significant journeys, vapour trails in skies. I fill sketchbooks with my observations.

It is a consciousness that busy lives are often forced to or choose to ignore and that makes my experience very precious to me because I am able to be where I want to be. So my work is an attempt to share my feelings and observations with others. It is an attempt to honour my own experience.

My books ‘invite’ the viewer into the landscape of my mind and into the environment. The larger paper works, (or large pages) attempt to express the context of the books in a living way. They are to honour the magnitude of the natural world. They are to excite and create visual interest and experience.”

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Papier

Magali Gentric ·

Stockroom Kyneton, gallery one
08 September / 07 October 2012

KIM BARTER
Papier

Kim Barter’s Papier is an exhibition of paintings and drawings that express the inner feeling of being ‘in the landscape’. Starting from sketches undertaken on various camping trips in places as diverse as the beach, the desert, and the mountains, Kim imbues memory and feeling into the motion of her brushstrokes and mark-making. Allowing chance and a sense of self-discovery to guide her hand, she conjures up evocative work that is richly layered yet wildly free.

Utilising random gestural drawings, paint splotches, rubbings and notes, Kim’s interpretation of the landscape reflects how it ages, adapts, evolves, suffers and celebrates life. These colourful, uplifting paintings are reflective of the strength and beauty of the landscape, and are geared to inspire a reconnection with the potency of a reality we all share but all too easily find ourselves absent from.

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Secondhand Serenade

Magali Gentric ·

Stockroom Kyneton, gallery two
08 September / 07 October 2012

STEFAN GEVERS
Secondhand Serenade

The influence of abandoned places on our imaginations and memories.

Stefan Gevers explores how a place abandoned and forgotten can still exert a spiritual influence on the imagination or memory. The work in his new show will focus on overlooked details in the landscape, magnifying evidence of human intervention and presence and exploring the interface between the man-made and nature.

All of my art is inspired by road trips in regional Australia where I search for forgotten objects and places. In these desolate spots, I identify the essential visual elements that will allow me to evoke the silence and stillness of these ignored – yet fundamental – parts of the Australian landscape. In 2008, my exhibition, Natural Order, presented images of a stranded car, an old wooden bridge and crumbling watertanks showing the plight of the man-made in the face of the unrelenting forces of nature. In 2010, my exhibition, Forgotten Places, focused on abandoned places which were once central to people’s lives and the temporal nature of our interaction with nature.

My work attempts to provoke both a visual and spiritual experience in others by prompting them to contemplate notions of abandon- ment, degradation and loss in relation to both the Australian landscape and themselves.

Stefan appears at Stockroom courtesy of Anita Traverso Gallery