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45downstairs, Melbourne - November 2009

I spent my early childhood years on the limestone plains of south eastern South Australia. On hot summer days the landscape was bleached white by the blazing midday sun but as evening approached, colour returned and luminous blue shadows from the red gums crept through the grass, now golden in the late afternoon light.

 

I was intrigued by the intensity of colour in these shadows; it was as if I was looking through transparent slivers of stained glass in an otherwise dusty, opaque landscape.

 

In my last show, Shadowland, I created voids in paper, filled with shadow. In this new show, the voids are infused with colour. With the exception of four of the works, Trunks, Rift and Accretion #1 and 2, the colour is reflected from a concealed pigment source, and although the effect is like looking at small pools of incandescent gas you are in fact looking at plain white paper. This approach attains hues impossible to achieve with pigments on a conventional flat surface.

 

The pieces are a syncresis between my intent (to examine the increased luminosity of colour lying in shadow) and the inherent behavioural characteristics of the material (in this case, paper). This syncresis generates its own forms and formal arrangements; I call this Syncretic Formalism.

 

The titles I have given the pieces are suggested to me by the completed work. The pieces are not imbued with any message or meaning so consequently provide ripe pickings for any viewers creative imagination.

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