GroupJuly2016 | Stella Downer Fine Art - Dealer Consultant & Valuer

Gallery Artists

Merran Esson, Janet Dawson, Ian Gentle, Rod Holdaway, Di Holdsworth & Mary MacQueen

5 July - 30 July

Gallery Artists brings together gallery artists JANET DAWSON, MERRAN ESSON, ROD HOLDAWAY, DI HOLDSWORTH, IAN GENTLE and MARY MACQUEEN to examine the landscape in its many forms. Ranging across the mediums of paint, iPad drawings, sculpture and ceramics, some artists reflect upon the organic forms of the natural landscape, and others engage with the bustling urbanscape and its social paradigms.

For JANET DAWSON the mutability of nature takes focus in her latest work. Drawn from her rural life, the works are portrayed in the sensitive pastel renderings of early morning dew, travelling clouds and her local surrounds. DAWSON's landscapes express an intimacy with natural Australia and its many moods.

The perforated forms of MERRAN ESSON's ceramic vessels resonate with the naturally occurring catchments within the rural landscape, such as basin shaped areas and drainage networks. Engaging with the organic as well as the industrial forms of the landscape, ESSON's buckets are reminiscent of water tanks and silos embedded in the country.

ROD HOLDAWAY's paintings are an expression of people and place, revealing the intertwined interactions between physical and psychological landscapes. HOLDAWAY fragments and dissects, winds and navigates his way through familiar streetscapes and public parks. In conveying the narratives of congested interactions on the street and in the park, these paintings reflect upon the social constructs that underpin human behaviour.

Cutting up and reassembling plastic, replica toys from the 1960s, DI HOLDSWORTH subverts the notion of the traditional 'unattainable' music box ballerina. Navigating the social landscape and its paradigms, she undercuts the idea of women as still objects, positioning the female assemblages to ride animals with 1960s plastic cowboys in an acts that are both whimsical and underpinned by desire.

IAN GENTLE referred to his sculptural wall works as 'drawing'. Trained as a painter, his components of eucalypt wood twigs and branches, each carefully stripped and meticulously tied together, are informed by an understanding of composition as they "grow off the walls". The eucalypt timber works are imbued with Australian bush mythology, as his idiomatic titles suggest.