Opening: Friday 21st October 

to Sunday 30th October 2022

 

Divergent Terrain is an exhibition gathering three artists; Harrison See, Leonie Mansbridge and Kelsey Ashe,whose practices’ are critically engaged with the challenging forces of multi-cross-cultural exchange and collision. 

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Grounded in narratives of contemporary landscape, the artists navigate the difficult terrain of dialogue amid the worlds increasing cultural and political tensions and  forces of globalisation, to locate their respective art practices.  

 

Cultural exchange is a process that has been occurring for centuries, not just in the form of art and design, but in syncretic religions, eclectic philosophies, languages, cuisine, architecture, music and, of course, people.  It is a necessary unfolding and one that would be impossible to halt.

 

Thought leaders in fields of cultural hybridity and exchange point out that no single culture can remain pure, and whilst there will always be negative and positive attitudes towards hybridisation, it is a process in which some things can be lost and broken, but so too, can new things be formed.

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Venus Disrupted I to XIV imagines an ‘Everywhen’ of the artist Kelsey Ashe’s lived and imagined Ancestral territories.
It is a dreamscape where multiple places exist at once, and the future and the past sit side by side.  Recognisable landforms from Tasmania, Polynesia, Scotland and the Faroe Islands can be found in this terrain and Venus is observed in her eternal loop across the horizon.   

 

Rocky caves appear to grow seaweed, so perhaps too, we are underwater, as well as above.  That this landscape should be ‘disrupted’, ‘broken up’ and ‘sold off’ is metaphorical of our modern day society which dissects land, sets boundaries and claims territories in a form of ownership we cannot seem to escape.

 

Artist Kelsey Ashe draws landscape images directly onto

Wax Coated Etching sheets.  These drawings are then turned into Silk Screen Stencils and hand-printed onto raw canvas with BotanicalInks made from the ancient and resilient dyes of Indigo and Myrolaban. 

  

Ashe has developed contemporary forms of Japanese Textile printing techniques that use various resins, waxes, and inks to build up the large scale image.  Each print has individual ‘decalcomania’ marks that are part of the process of working with natural dyes and print.