Evxhibition

Gallipoli
Watters Gallery
17th June to 4th July

"Gallipoli" comprises plein air works painted in Gallipoli during the artist’s trips to Turkey in 2013 and 2014 (see ‘Your Friend the Enemy’ exhibitions below), as well as studio-based works and etchings which further develop themes and ideas from the ‘Your Friend the Enemy’ exhibitions.

Contact Watters Gallery for further information.

Rope
Bowen Galleries
13th April to 2nd May

Artist, Tasman Glacier, 1976 photo by Richard Pears

Euan Madeod - 'Rope' by Gregory O'Brien

In an epoch stricken by global warming and environmental change, images of calving icebergs and serious weather events have attained an almost everyday status. The ground beneath our feet isn't as firm as it once seemed. Roped to the physical world and to one another, the persistent human characters in Euan Macleod's 'Rope' might almost be a stabilising influence upon this ever-subsiding, eroding world.

The title of this exhibition draws attention to the shared fabric, the ties that bind one human to another. Macleod's art has often explored filial bonds in particular—and nowhere more explicitly than here. Yet it doesn't end with the father/son relationship. In numerous paintings, the rope links a single protagonist to someone or something outside the picture frame. The paintings play out a broader drama of being alive in the natural world, of drawing breath, moving upwards or down the rope, carrying the weight of an unspecified past and looking towards a future or after-life beyond the mountain.

These are not the idealised mountain-scapes of Austen Deans; neither are they the sweary interior of the Alpine Club hut. Macleod clears a space for a range of emotional currents—exhaustion, frustration, impatience, fear, relief, acceptance... Clambering around in their own inner-space, as well as traversing crater and ridge, the figures run the gamut of human emotion. Like the two characters in Damien Wilkins's The Descent of Man', they might have spent three nights in a snow cave, but they are still made of the same irritable, endearing stuff as humanity at large. In all their bravery, foolishness and vulnerability, they are roped to the rest of us.

Ice Fall 2014, acrylic on polyester 100 x 124cm