An insight into the worlds of Jacqueline Fahey, Sylvia Siddell, Belinda Griffiths, Jacqueline Macleod and Tracey Coakley.
While gender specifically plays no specific role in the capacity or ability to create compelling paintings these female artists have all embraced a particularly personal conversation with the figure.
BELINDA GRIFFITHS
This series of works is inspired by the quote 'No man steps into the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man' by Heraclitus. Monotype prints by nature are never identical, so they were the perfect medium to use in a series that explores ideas of time, change and the human experience.
My work is about reclaiming light, both from a technical as well as a conceptual point of view. The figures in my works are all searching for something bigger than themselves - be it direction, truth, hope or faith. Vast ideas which are ultimately reduced to a very human and limited capacity for resolving them. In the same way my works don't give answers, but offer glimpses of light as seen through the muck of the mark.
JACQUELINE MACLEOD
Memory For Sale - The body of work I am currently working on explores female identity within urban online existence. I question the way in which digital Connectedness and platforms such as Facebook act as an arena for the augmentation and commercialization of memory and human emotion: exposing, controlling, owning and manipulating human emotion and memory. Ones identity and social life has become a commodity, public property and content to be used, sold, exploited; ones rights to privacy a fallacy, as each persons emotion and memory is shared and owned by millions of other people.
By exploring new representational paradigms involved in the intertwining of painting, and digital imagery, my work reflects upon the break down of barriers between physical and virtual space and its psychological implications, the result of which I hope is both alluring and unsettling. My work oscillates between a kind of formalistic portraiture, with contrasts of Vermeer and Borresman as influences, to disguise ourselves or identify, the question remains.
These artists have careers that span early, middle and late across both centuries and their work speaks to the past, present and future. Exhibition opens 23 February, 5.30pm. All welcome.