Open 10:30–5:00, Tuesday – Saturday
Wednesday 31st July, 2024
7pm Tea, Coffee, Prosecco Reception, view the exhibition Material Flux
7.30pm 8.30pm – In Conversation
On the occasion of the two person exhibition Material Flux by Aleana Egan and Isabel Nolan, join the artists in conversation with London-based, Australian novelist, screenwriter, art critic, curator and broadcaster Jennifer Higgie as they discuss art, ideas and process.
About
Previously the editor of Frieze magazine, Jennifer Higgie is an Australian writer who lives in London. Her books The Mirror & The Palette: Rebellion, Resilience and Resistance: 500 Years of Women’s Self Portraits (2021) and The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art and the Spirit (2023) are published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
She is the presenter of Bow Down, a podcast about women in art history; the author and illustrator of the children’s book There’s Not One; the editor of The Artist’s Joke; author of the novel Bedlam; and the writer of the feature film I Really Hate My Job. In 2015, Jennifer curated the Hayward Touring and Arts Council Collection exhibition One Day, Something Happens: Pictures of People, which travelled from 2015-17 to Leeds Art Gallery; Nottingham Castle; The Atkinson, Southport; Towner Gallery, Eastbourne, and Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda. She has been a judge of the John Moore’s Painting Prize, the Paul Hamlyn Award, the Turner Prize and the 2021 Freelands Painting Prize and a member of the advisory boards of Arts Council England, the British Council Venice Biennale Commission and the Contemporary Art Society. She is currently on the Imperial War Museum Art Commissions Committee.
Jennifer has a BA Fine Art (Painting) from the Canberra School of Art, and a MA (Fine Art, Painting) from Victoria College of the Arts, Melbourne; her paintings are in various public and private collections in Australia. She travelled to London on a Murdoch Fellowship in 1995 and stayed.
Isabel Nolan has an expansive practice that incorporates sculptures, paintings, textile works, photographs, writing and works on paper. Her subject matter is similarly comprehensive, taking in cosmological phenomena, religious reliquaries, Greco-Roman sculptures and literary/historical figures, examining the behaviour of humans and animals alike. These diverse artistic investigations are driven by intensive research, but the end result is always deeply personal and subjective. Exploring the “intimacy of materiality”, Nolan’s work ranges from the architectural – steel sculptures that frame or obstruct our path – to small handmade objects in clay, hand-tufted wool rugs illuminated with striking cosmic imagery, to drawings and paintings using humble gouache or colouring pencils. In concert, they feel equally enchanted by and afraid of the world around us, expressing humanity’s fear of mortality and deep need for connection as well as its startling achievements in art and thought. Driven by “the calamity, the weirdness, horror, brevity and wonder of existing alongside billions of other preoccupied humans”, her works give generous form to fundamental questions about the ways the chaos of the world is made beautiful or given meaning through human activity.
In late 2020, Launchpad and Kerlin Gallery published ‘Curling up with reality’, bringing together a decade of Nolan’s work including significant exhibitions and 20 of the artist’s writings.
Working primarily with sculpture, and occasionally with painting and film, Aleana Egan engenders psychological states and memories through enigmatic arrangements of objects and forms. Her sculptural works appear restrained, but are laden with subtle references to the built environment. An airy, slender metal structure might echo an architectural form plucked out of the landscape, while her use of simple household materials – plaster, cardboard, matte paint and various fabrics – speak to the domestic. Egan’s practice is shaped by her deep engagement with works of literature and cinema: never opting for direct representation, she uses this source material as an entryway, absorbing the moods and tones it evokes. Her forms and shapes act as traces or shifting responses, tentative articulations of remembered places or everyday moments. A meandering, sensuous line and sense of fluidity is carried from her sculptures into her film and painting, giving form to a sense of flux, openness and mutability.
