Jan Murphy Gallery is excited to present our first exhibition with Protégé artist Charlotte Ghaie.
Working gently and intuitively with pastel on paper, Ghaie’s works explore fragmented cultural identity and the slipperiness of memory. Through a haze of smudged colour, ambiguous and at times unnerving figures emerge in her work, along with elements of the everyday and family life. Her work is grounded in the practice of drawing and maintains a relationship to her heritage, connecting the threads of the past to the present.
“The title ‘Night is as long as a whole day’, was taken from one of my child’s bedtime protests, an innocent and poetic reckoning with time, darkness, and the many things it can be filled with. Created following six weeks in India, these works explore an inner world, filled with ancestral inheritances, myths, fantasies, and impulses. By making these images, I am gently drawing these shadows out into the physical realm.” – Charlotte Ghaie, 2023
Charlotte Ghaie is an Indian-Australian artist raised in regional Victoria living between Naarm/Melbourne and the Northern Rivers/Bundjalung land in New South Wales. Ghaie completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at Monash University in 2007 and went on to study both education and art therapy.
Image: Charlotte Ghaie, The girl imagining the ghost or the ghost imagining the girl, 2023, soft pastel on paper, 41.0 x 56.0 cm. Image courtesy of Jan Murphy Gallery and Charlotte Ghaie