Abstract
Ah, for those never-ending summer days of childhood. Locating that perfect grassy spot and laying on your back, enjoying the breeze gently propelling a series of brilliant white fluffy clouds, in a multitude of shapes, sizes, textures and patterns, across the sky. Allowing your mind to simply coast along …
All you needed was your imagination to find that playful kitten, Pegasus or a high-heeled shoe worthy of Manolo Blahnik, perhaps an enormous Alice in Wonderland ‘eat me’ mushroom or a Queen’s throne, right there in the clouds and ready to be found.
What was it that you spotted in
Before ‘mindfulness’ became a buzzword, and meditation a multi-million dollar industry, kids were already experts at relaxing – they had no trouble in slowing down and focussing on the present. The digital world didn’t exist. They scanned the clouds, looking for shapes that matched their memories, and sometimes found mythical creatures or fabulous situations when those images merged.
As Nicola explains, after ‘thinking a lot about the construction of a landscape, of how to best distil a story down into a single, flattened image’ she found that the ‘narratives themselves are never very grand, collaged as they are out of a funny little jumble of scenes flashed past a car window, but it is in their mundanity that my tenderness for them lies.’
Her art, she notes, is best described as a ‘secondary, tender landscape which drapes atop the first. This other landscape is a fluid, moving geography formed from a scrapbook of memory, sentimentality, and a kind of observed, prosaic mythology.’
‘It is not the well-worn, often travelled highway itself, but the nostalgia and familiarity which renders it numinous.’
And while it is ‘not exactly a vision of paradise, nor a reflection in a mirror’, Nicola says that her artwork is a ‘dutiful attempt to articulate the incredible fondness I feel for the landscapes close to me.’
Nicola Gower Wallis was the 2018 winner of Bett Gallery’s Graduate Award, judged in collaboration with the School of Creative Arts and Media at the University of Tasmania. Her work, which has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, is held in Artbank, the Macquarie Group Collection and also in private collections.
Nicola Gower Wallis
Gouache on paper
70 x 100cm
Cover image courtesy of the artist and Bett Gallery
© Nicola Gower Wallis
