Opening Night: Friday 12 June 6–8pm

Exhibition Dates: 12 June - 27 June

Stones feel permanent, they hold the earth together. They are so familiar it is easy to overlook how deeply they shape everyday life. Rocks and stones are foundational to how we live, build, create, grow, make, wear and manufacture. collect them wherever go - I'm sure you pick them up too.

Songs of Stones brings together works that contemplate the ubiquitous nature of rocks and Through figurative compositions still life alongside abstract expressionistic responses, reveal, conceal and merge stone both as original source in landscape alongside its transmutation into everyday objects - vessels of clay and glass; bricks and mortar; pigment and paint.

Wherever I am in the landscape, urban or rural, I am drawn to the presence of rocks and stones: their forms, their weight, their stillness, the way we use them. They exist on a different scale of time. They sing silently of long ancient earth histories. They are everywhere go on the beach, along bush trials, on high mountain trecks, in urban parks and gardens, in roads and pavements, built into break walls and tower blocks...the list is endless. The stones, rocks and boulders paint are familiar to me. They either sit as objects in my studio or have been sketched in the landscape. Everything is remembered. Still life, composed in domestic interiors, is a large part of my painting practice. The substance of everyday vessels is glass and clay, the origin is rock and stone.

The process opens with a compelling idea that demands expression, loose and uninhibited, using line, colour, texture; responding intuitively to the marks, building the painting, removing and revealing, repeating and reworking towards resolution; working gesturally and energetically or very slowly finishing a detail. A painting feels complete when it can balance these things, optically and emotionally. In away my abstract work is my respite from the real - it is an emotional and spiritual retreat.

Then at some point, usually dictated by life circumstances, there is a pulling, tightening that turns me away from the gestural work to a more contained, controlled compositional practice of still life. These are times when I feel I need more control, I return to structured still life painting using traditional oil painting techniques. Here I have anchors and perimeters, here I know what I am doing and can predict what will happen. This experience is settling and nurturing. It also runs it course and another wave of abstraction will return. These two parts of me, the unrestrained and the contained, have joined forces to create this body of work, Songs of Stones. I began expressively with abstraction, as time passed and the stresses of the year's end mounted I found myself tightening, needing more control and moved to still life compositions. This transition was unconscious.

Opening night supported by Sea Salt & Sage Catering, Young Henrys, Symphonia Wines, Heaps Normal, NON

Free entry | All welcome