Lorna Grear

JFourplay- The artful play of making, building and colourising. These four artists play with materials to create delightfully seductive art objects. Anney Bounpraseuth reuses popular culture to tease us with exquisite images, Lorna Grear recycles domestic and commercial materials to make work grounded in an intuitive and material process; Freya Jobbin’s wonderfully crafted sculptures seduce you with irony and humour. Lastly Rosie Deacon constructs spirited installations which will surprise you with a physical, textural focus.

LORNA GREAR            STACKED              2011      

Stacked, packed to the rafters, jammed full of stuff. In Lorna Grear’s new body of work surprising effects happen from the stacked paintings. Recycled, found plywood is used as grounds; painted and stacked to cause deeper spaces. Shadows move within the works. Meaning is inherent. Silhouettes are painted on tourist stencil templates of Australian fauna; possums, platypus and kangaroos.  Once discarded, used now. The piles of plywood make the issue of space real: 3D. The viewer can travel into them.

Along side the discarded templates, left over packaging is also used. A shout to Rauschenberg; and a nod to the readymade; these cardboard boxes and plastic wraps have been used as canvas for paintings. They are displayed as a smorgasbord of miscellaneous ideas.

Colour too, is celebrated and falls easily into place. Sometimes the colour comes from an old T- Shirt design, other times it belongs to midnight; mostly it is intuitive and based on rhythms. The personal is hidden in the choice of colour.

As much as the work references Australian art history the idea remains abstract. Within this abstraction are contradictions of dualities. Baroque but minimal; formal yet easy; geometric and at the same time organic. It is no longer Formalist, no longer Hard Edge; it has Op Art references, even a Modernist theme. It could be old and new.

Lorna has held numerous solo shows including at the infamous Tailor Room Gallery, Sydney 1998 – 2003 and Peloton in 2005 and 2009. Other galleries include, Imperial slacks, Herringbone, SNO, Phatspace, Zitlip, Firstdraft and Mop Projects. Her work has been hung in the Portia Geach Memorial Prize, Fishers Ghost Art Award, Mosman Art Prize and the Liverpool Art Prize. Before this her time was spent in London initiating community arts groups, namely The Dolehouse Collective and Scarecrow Tiggy-  an artist run co-operative in Camberwell, London. She is a graduate of both Sydney College of the Arts and The National Art School. Lorna currently teaches art history and painting at South Western Sydney Institute of TAFE and is in the middle of curating an exhibition titled ‘The Baker’s Dozen’ for UTS Gallery in 2012.

-STACKED @ Peloton runs 24 November – 17 December 2011

Peloton Gallery 25 Meagher Street Chippendale, Sydney NSW 2008

Gallery hours: Thursday to Saturday 1-5pm

      

 

 

 

 

Lorna is a visual artist pre- occupied by unusual illusions to space. Originally a landscape painter Lorna’s current work deals with ideas of place seen through pattern and colour. It would be to over simplify the ideas in Lorna’s work to discuss in terms of space and colour alone. Woven into the abstraction are years of personal iconography and experience. Sometimes the works reflect direct influences of Op art; namely Bridget Riley and at other times Hard Edge and Neo Pop is allured to. The influences are vast and varied.

Recently Lorna’s work uses references to Australian art history; placing iconic figures amongst her heavily patterned colour scapes. They are a palimpsest of art upon art.  In Dippity Beach Pattern, Charles Meere’s lady from Australian Beach Pattern is repeated within the painting.

Dippity Beach Pattern, oil on board, 2011

In another painting, Gruner’s Spring Rainbow, Elioth Gruner’s wonderful Spring Frost is copied into the patterned landscape.   Beside this sits George Raper’s Waratah.

As well as painting Lorna works with found objects such as recycled packaging, left over stencils from mass produced goods and plastic coverings. These are transformed into 3 dimensional painted works and often hold personal significance to the artist