We would like to invite you to BigCi Open Day featuring current artists in residence and their work:
Catriona Pollard (Sydney) merges abstract sculptures foraged from plant material with traditional basketry techniques. Using an intuitive minimal aesthetic, she transforms this organic media into art works, investigating the battle humans have between controlling nature and seeing themselves in harmony with it. Through this reinterpretation of nature, her work offers up the concept that we should actively see nature as part of us rather than simply an object that has no meaning or spirit.
Richard Wu(Sydney), a Chinese ink brush artist who sees his painting as a practice of self-cultivation towards Dao, the return to elemental and authentic. His painting project features the ‘trilogy of Dao’, beginning with seeking. This is followed by seeing. The trilogy ends in the image of knowing. Richard will reveal a surprise to this image on the Open Day and will show that intricacies and complexities of Nature coexist with, and are indeed manifestations of, the waterfall.
Gary Shinfield (Blue Mountains). Gary’s practice encompasses making works on paper, and this includes various forms of printmaking, painting, staining, drawing and installation. He responds to cicadas, shifting surface of water, ochre coloured ground and sounds of nature, transforming these into drawings and paintings on paper, using natural pigment stains and inks. His work overlaps its physical presence with fragments of memory, renewal and sensation of nature.
Brenton Schwab (Sydney). Brenton’s work is mostly abstract painting and is about the process of making. Much of his enjoyment comes from discovery, which he links to personal experiences within nature. His work at BigCi incorporates these chance and random processes and superimposes elements inspired by Marine Signal Flags. The distortion of this standard communication system reflects how we receive messages around our environmental problems and solutions.
Alexandra Frank (Burrill Lake) has a background in illustration and community art. She paints images of human-animal morphs, inspired by mythology and dreams, as a comment on our forgotten connection with natural forces and elemental cycles. She wants to get primal, earthed, pure in her artistic approach. To know the “all”, which we all are. So, the process of her drawings becomes more interesting than any finished work.
Leave a Reply