Scenic Roots

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday July 20, 2002

Lenny Ann Low

Lenny Ann Low travels through landscapes ravaged by heat, bursting with life and scorched by fire.

TIM STORRIER - CONSTRUCTIONS, PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS FROM THE 1970s AND '80s

Australian Galleries

In some of Tim Storrier's works, the hot, hazy light feels so bright you almost squint in the glare. Dream Landscape and Altitude Landscape, two large-scale paintings from 1976, present vast and powerful views of barren ranges within an almost endless canyon. The air seems still and cloyed with a fine white powder. Landscape Still Life features a mess of shiny plums and apples baking in the sun on a cracked, pale orange earth. It is as if someone tipped over a fruit stall just beyond the painting's frame.

The more you look at Storrier's work the more an image emerges of him tramping across deserts and past pyramids while loaded down with paints, canvas and camping equipment. Drawings of deck chairs lumbered with saddlebags, drinking bottles and tin cups strapped with string or leather belts seem to correlate with paintings of immaculate brick ruins and makeshift structures offering shade under a haphazardly flung piece of pink fabric.

In the midst of all these dream-like states, in Colonial Garden, tough-looking brown reeds burst out of a pale cylinder on a patch of hard, flat earth.

15 Roylston Street, Paddington, 9360 5177, Tuesday to Saturday

10am-6pm. Until August 3.

RACHEL HONNERY/

MITZI VARDILL/JO TRACY

PCL Exhibitionists

In the work of these three artists, the earth and the life that grows from it are secretive and darkly luminous. Rachel Honnery's series of digital works and paintings, Travelling In Landscapes, reveals hills that look like soft skin, brooding bays dappled with watery light and landscapes ravaged by bushfire. Great View, a digital print on cotton paper, seems to feature the bright, spindly red branches of a fallen tree. Looked at further, it could be a series of bloody rivulets coursing under the ground. After The Fire is a charred view of plant life barely able to remain standing. Elsewhere, Mitzi Vardill's etchings, prints and drawings are a subtle landscape of twisting tubers and groping roots. In Silvern Fruit, curling plant forms seem to barricade together in a riddle of knots. And finally, Jo Tracy's digital works and paintings contain ordered yet poetic scratchings over gently suggestive patches of earth.

613 Elizabeth Street, Strawberry Hills,

9310 1277, Monday to Friday 10am-6pm, Saturday

10am-4pm. Until July 27.

ETERNAL ECHOES

Salmon Galleries

At the age of six, Aboriginal artist Carmel Nicholson was taken from her mother and sent to a Brisbane convent in the care of the Good Shepherd Sisters. She stayed there until her mid-60s. During her early years at the convent, she wrote to her mother Rosie every month and in return her mother sent her small batches of wildflowers picked after the rains in her homeland at Quilpie in south-western Queensland. This series of paintings commemorates and expresses Nicholson's love for her mother and the changing landscape of her home. Rising mounds of bursting blossoms, in brilliant pinks, whites, reds, oranges and yellows, swarm across the canvas. Buntamurra Country contains a brilliant mass of trees and smaller plants crammed together like multicoloured fairy floss shooting out of the ground.

71 Union Street, McMahons Point, 9922 4133, Saturday 11am-5pm, Sunday 11am-4pm. Closes tomorrow.

NEBULOUS/WEATHER

Boutwell Draper Gallery

Eerie, empty corners. The fall of sunlight on the bare boards of a deserted home. Grubby smudges on painted walls. In Nebulous, Annie Hogan's photographs of the interiors of suburban Queensland houses, the viewer discovers the presence of humans long gone. Inside various slightly battered rooms, sunlight seems to be the only inhabitant. In Untitled I, the only thing left is a key in the door and venetians on the windows. It is almost as if Hogan is not in the room, pressing the shutter button, leaving us alone in a space both marked by and devoid of life. In the second gallery space, Mark Titmarsh's art works, called Weather, are like skidding toffee colours rushing full-tilt into an accident. That or vibrant neon-like wavelengths from an earthquake blasting over glossy plastic planes. Another work looks like a candy land form melting gently into the clear blue sea. Everywhere you look, liquid

and colour oozes, pours

and pools in energetically

skew-whiff paintings.

82-84 George Street, Redfern, 9310 5662, Wednesday to Saturday

11am-5pm. Until July 27.

© 2002 Sydney Morning Herald

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