A SOLO SHOW

The Happenstore, Annandale

Saturday 12th – Saturday 26th May 2018

It was Spring, still cool and wet, and I was bushwalking with friends up the track leading to the cross atop Mount Macedon. A weekly brief respite from children, our shared hike is an opportunity to immerse ourselves in bushland, expansive sky and views. As I walked, the beauty of the Mount struck me and the ideas for this exhibition began to form.

I wanted to paint more landscapes and to do so outside whenever possible. These works started as words scribbled in notebooks that I carry with me always. Ideas are refined and ruminated on, words become sketches, sketches the basis of the fully realized paintings.

The paintings depict outdoor scenes from my daily wanderings around the Macedon ranges, coastal hideaways in southern New South Wales and still-life scenes created in my home studio using foliage and blooms collected from my own garden or those of friends and family.

When I first settled on the title of the body of work “In All Weather” I did not imagine it would be less about weather and bushwalking and more about the tension between being a mother and an artist. As I look at the completed body of work now it is clear to me that these works reveal something deeper and more personal. Maybe it’s signified by the re-emergence of the figure in my paintings that indicate this. My son napping on the couch in the studio amid lush and heavily patterned textiles, a hint of a tanned arm in a deck chair and a self-portrait of myself on the floor resting for just a moment. There is no escape from motherhood, nor can an artist separate her creative identity. You could say that an artist and a mother both weather life, the good and the bad, all day and night, rain hail and shine.

~ Elizabeth Barnett (2018)

* Click on images below to enlarge.

ABOUT ELIZABETH.

Elizabeth Barnett’s creative practice encompasses painting, printmaking and illustration. Elizabeth’s work documents her surroundings, often depicting intimate domestic spaces filled with exotic and interesting plants, colour, treasured objects and furniture, seasonal still life compositions and landscapes.

Elizabeth studied a Bachelor of Fine Arts Printmaking at The Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne 2002-2004, Bachelor Fine Arts Honours – Printmaking, RMIT, Melbourne, 2006, Masters of Arts- Illustration, Camberwell College of Art, London, 2008-2009 and was awarded the Collie Print Trust scholarship at the Australian Print Workshop in 2006. Elizabeth founded Schoolhouse Studios Inc with Alice Glenn in 2010, a not-for-profit artist studios complex in the former St. Joseph’s Technical College in Abbotsford.

Elizabeth now lives in the Macedon Ranges where she works from her home studio.

Elizabeth Barnett - Purchase Enquiry Form

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55 Parramatta Road, Annandale 2038

For more information contact curator Amber Creswell Bell

amber@ambercreswell.com

0414 747 761