We exist between natural and man-made environments, interconnected within social, digital and ecological networks. The way each of us weaves together our experiences, memories and perspectives forms our sense of how we belong.
In In Between artists Rachel Honnery, Josephine Morrow, Alison Peters and Mollie Rice reflect on the ways we exist within those networks. They are informed by memory and the experience of place: responding to landscape, urbanism and interior spaces. It provides a dialogue between inner and outer worlds and echoes what we feel, hear, smell rather than just what we see.
Spending time in the cold climate rainforests of lutruwita (Tasmania) Rachel Honnery wonders why governments selectively preserve one part of nature but then allow the destruction of another? The Eucalyptus regnans is a majestic giant, the world’s tallest flowering plant and yet it is still being logged in Tasmania. Occasionally forestry preserves a specimen tree or a remnant of forest. Why not preserve it all? Why log old growth forests that are full of ancient wonder? Honnery’s work “Gilded Cage”, endeavours to grapple with this rabid destruction. This artwork is a triptych made from knitted brass wire, jute string and old decaying tree branches. Using the concept of “nature” living inside a gilded cage, this work examines the beautiful, the precious, the exotic being trapped by splendour and without freedom, ultimately coming to a demise. The dig it up and chop it down mentality is a pervasive colonial mindset that we must move away from in order to survive as a species.
Josephine Morrow draws inspiration from art historical notions of ‘intimisme’, symbolism and decoration. She is particularly interested in the exploration of the thresholds of interior and exterior spaces and the notion of embodied looking. For Josephine, painting is an unfolding process of observation and composition, perception and invention. Through this choreographic venture, she interrogates space and form, structures and voids,recognition and defamiliarisation, all within a navigable space that invites a second glance.
Alison Peters’ work conjures the energy of places real, remembered and imagined. She is particularly drawn to the natural environment near her home on Darramuragal land near Garigal National Park where the sights and sounds of suburbia meet ancient rockscapes, indigenous middens and artworks dating back thousands of years. Her abstract paintings of interwoven gestural forms explore materiality, texture, and depth, and echo the liminal spaces between our man-made and natural environments.
Image: Mollie Rice, Sound Score (detail1), 2024, archival ink on rice paper
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