Unfolding

Magali Gentric ·

Stockroom Kyneton, ceramic space
03 December 2022/ 22 January 2023

ANGELA HAYES
Unfolding

Unfolding is a drama of contradictions. It is darkness against light, a straight edge against a splash and a drip, a surprise at a random turn, a strong, sharp shadow cutting a flash of sunlight. It is the tension between seeking control and giving in to what is natural.

For this exhibition, the artist has crafted a theatre of contrasting dynamics. Of stillness and discipline with forms against expressive and gestural surfaces.

Angela Hayes’ ceramic sculptures originate from the study of the classic pouring vessel many years ago. The lip, the body, the foot, the spout, and the handle have evolved from wheel-thrown vessels to contemporary slab-made architectonic forms. Her work has departed from the functional constraints of the vessel and instead has become a receptacle for her artist’s voice.

Hayes studied Fine Arts - Ceramics at Queensland College of Art and later completed a Bachelor and Master of Landscape Architecture at the University of Melbourne. Her landscape architecture design practice, research and teaching have developed a distinct style and keen eye for design which is demonstrated in her ceramic work. Angela has received numerous awards for her design work. She has exhibited her ceramic sculptures interstate, in China and at numerous galleries in Melbourne.

Hayes creates ceramic sculptures from her inner-city studio in Melbourne. She finds inspiration in her urban environment through experimentation with traditional ceramics processes and refinement of new technical discoveries.

I AVAILABLE ARTWORKS I

Making sense of nonsense

Magali Gentric ·

Stockroom Kyneton, gallery two
22 October / 27 November 2022

LAETITIA OLIVIER-GARGANO
Making sense of nonsense 

Painting 2 (Life felt like mince meat, but I can’t even afford that anymore.), 2022, gouache, epoxy resin, polymer paint on board, framed, 40 x 40 cm

Trying to make sense of the chaotic nature of the last few years, Laetitia depicts her experiences in a cheerfully nihilistic way. Aestheticising hyper-real forms to convey emotions and memories, Making sense of nonsense is almost a painting show, not quite a sculpture show.

Carefully painted ‘hyper-surreal’ resin sculptures are laid out like constructivist paintings among a vivid, energetic blue. Lunch leftovers become abstract collages and detailed sculptures double as whimsical candelabras. Each life-like scene is intently placed as a tactile translation of memory.

Food is the defining feature of this exhibition, as a joyful comfort, as helpful procrastination, and as a reminder of loved ones. Fleshy oysters ooze their ‘bougie’ picnic opulence. An impassive brick of minced meat stresses the appreciation of boredom.

All timely reminders that life is just a bit nonsense.

Laetitia’s practice is driven by a close survey of food, plants and everyday objects, through surreal sculptural reimagining. By blurring the boundaries of complex yet recognisable forms, her work playfully incites both a sense of wonder and unease. These edible and domestic items speak to deeply personal emotions, memories and associations. Her work often engenders bodily responses from viewers due to its intense familiarity, yet complete absurdity. Our stomach turns, and we want to look away, but curiosity stops us. It is this uncanny sensation and the universality of it that her works make us aware of.

Laetitia currently works from her studio in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. She graduated in 2016 with a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) from Monash University. Her work has been exhibited nationally at institutions such as Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Cement Fondu, Notfair and Firstdraft. Her work has also featured in Broadsheet, Artist Profile and Art + Australia journals. In 2019 Laetitia received the Freedman Foundation Travelling Scholarship for Emerging Artists, administered by NAVA. She undertook research in Japan, learning how to make their iconic plastic food samples. Laetitia’s practice often involves ‘hyper-surrealistic’ resin cast sculpture, stop-motion animation and works on paper.

I AVAILABLE ARTWORKS I

Magali Gentric ·

Stockroom Kyneton, ceramic space
21 May / 26 June 2022

DAVID RAY
Four Treasons

The Industrial Revolution (1750 onwards) was a critical time of change; advances in machine technologies enabled the production of steam from coal, and then electricity which empowered efficient manufacturing processes and global transport.  Our cities became the epicentres for trade, and a melting pot for developing new economic classes and political systems. 

Industrialisation occurred to the detriment of our natural world, which continues today.  Our cultures began to disassociate ourselves from nature, and in its place is a world driven by the economic and political market where profit and loss drive consumerism, and the control of our world’s resources.

The ‘Four Seasons’ concept has been documented throughout many cultures to represent the order of nature, often through mythical stories and art.  The ‘Four Season Figurines’ made in Staffordshire England (pictured) are prime examples of how artists can reimagine nature as fantasy and turn them into a commodity.

“Figurines as cultural artefacts have an important role to playing enhancing awareness and understanding of human activity and its communication among peoples.” (Dr Hanz Syz- National Museum of American History)

Using the ‘Four Seasons’ narrative, I wanted to explore our current socio-political and economic structures as seasons, which led to my work ‘The Four Treasons’ (2020 – 22).  This work consists of four vehicles which are allegorical constructs, representing the four-socio political-economic seasons: Propaganda (Autumn), Destruction (Winter), Rebuild (Spring), Leisure (Summer)

I AVAILABLE ARTWORKS I

Zootopia

Magali Gentric ·

Stockroom Kyneton, gallery one
21 May / 26 June 2022

KATE ROHDE
Zootopia

In Zootopia, Kate Rohde presents several new and reworked pieces inspired by the historical Wunderkammer - shells, gems, corals and a menagerie of beasts fused together in a zoomorphic soup. Rohde’s imaginative and fanciful sculptures fuse museological documentation with a Rococo and Baroque aesthetic.

Created from a range of sculptural techniques, within these works are artificial representations of the natural. Here the use of inventive materials conveys an unusual beauty, nature reimagined in resin, plaster and clay, and rendered in a hyper colourful palette. Rohde invites you to enter a realm of fantasy, motivating contemporary discussions regarding ecology, extinction and preservation.

I AVAILABLE ARTWORKS I

Dread and Dream

Magali Gentric ·

Adam Boyd, Dream and Dread

Stockroom Kyneton, gallery two
21 May / 26 June 2022

ADAM BOYD
Dread and Dream

Do not pull at the difficult head,
this teetering
bulb of dread and dream . . .

— Russell Edson

These paintings were made with limited hues and saturations of blue, an attempt to restrict the dizzying, stupefying palette.

Taking inspiration from new surroundings the works draw from watching the growth, death and ramblings of a garden with its debris and deluge, its need to expand and retract.

In these pictures populated by monsters and shadows, blue has become the colour of dream and memory.

Somewhere between sleep and wake, between a blink and the brink; a teetering of continuous scapes and saturated moods.

Dread and Dream is a new exhibition by Adam Boyd presenting oil and acrylic paintings on board and canvas.

I AVAILABLE ARTWORKS I

Tender Sticks

Magali Gentric ·

Stockroom Kyneton, gallery three
02 April / 08 May 2022

TALITHA KENNEDY
Tender Sticks

Working with black leather for over a decade, Talitha Kennedy takes to heart the significance of using industrialised cow skin as materiality with conceptual intent. These soft sculptures of plant forms are uncanny taxidermy trophies to the wonder of nature as shadowed by human domination.

Soft and fleshy to the touch, the works tempt to be held with an intimacy in contrast to ouchy real sticks and perceived fears of non-human wildness. Twigs and other castoff limbs of trees become litter, maybe acknowledged for a time before being consumed to entropy. Their organic shape speaks of the will to grow while succumbing to decay. Hand-stitching and crafting these natural forms into bodily corporality is in tenderness to the transience of being and sensitive to the dark side of the human relationship with the natural world.

Talitha Kennedy works in black leather to embody the relationship between humans and the natural world. She has exhibited sculptures and drawings in solo shows in Melbourne, Sydney, Darwin and Townsville. She has exhibited in curated exhibitions including Legacy: Reflections on Mabo touring nationally (2019-2021), Fecund: Fertile Worlds toured by Artback NT (2018-2019), As long as the night is dark at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery and MARS Gallery (2017), and Not Fair (2014).

I AVAILABLE ARTWORKS I

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.

I AVAILABLE ARTWORKS I

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.

I AVAILABLE ARTWORKS I

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.

I AVAILABLE ARTWORKS I

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.

I AVAILABLE ARTWORKS I