Do Not Go Gentle borrows its title from Dylan Thomas’s poem Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, I view this poem to be about resistance, defiance and refusing to simply accept the inevitable. That idea of pushing against expectation became an important thread throughout this evolving body of work.
This exhibition also marks a shift in my own practice. After a two-week residency at The Corridor Project in regional NSW on beautiful Wiradjuri country, surrounded by an incredible and encouraging group of women artists, I decided I wanted to do something I hadn’t quite been brave enough to do before: to paint nothing.
By that, I don’t mean leaving the landscape behind but letting go of the need to represent it. I wanted the work to be reflective and of the landscape rather than a depiction of it — to take the colours, textures, rhythms and atmosphere of a place and translate them through abstraction. Instead of painting what I could see, I wanted to respond to how the environment felt, allowing fragments of landscape to emerge through colour, mark-making, layering and intuition without needing to resolve into something solid and recognisable.
The beginning of this year felt dim and overwhelming. Rather than making work about those experiences, I wanted this exhibition to push against them — to replace one kind of overwhelm with another. I wanted to fill the space with colour, energy and movement; to find moments of calm within the chaos and joy within the act of making.
At its heart, Do Not Go Gentle is about curiosity, play and experimentation. It is about ignoring expectations, trusting my instincts and following an idea without knowing where it will lead. It is about creating without a plan or preconceived outcome and allowing the work to simply evolve.
More than anything, this exhibition is a celebration of creative freedom and of where I am in my art practice right now — today.
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Join us on Saturday afternoon 10 October for the opening event and artist talk for Do not go gentle.
Opening event Saturday 10 October 4 – 6 pm
Artist talk 4.30 pm
