Regional Galleries - Gympie and Caboolture

 Yesterday I travelled to Gympie Regional Gallery to collect my exhibition Algalrhythms which has spent the last month or so there. I took the opportunity to view the new exhibition in the upstairs gallery – Arboreal Connections by Art Collective Carte Blanch. It was a very interesting collection of works, and some artists I was familiar with.

Trudy Stephens' works Symbiosis (etchings) and Entanglement (ceramics) was inspired by a Moreton Bay Fig and its massive root system - a nurturing communication hub. The delicate ceramic forms had a lovely sense of entangled movement in their social-like clusters.

Kim Coopers' Different Ways of Looking, created with oil paint on laminate was a dramatic wall, born of the explosions of colours, textures and senses of looking out at the ocean through tree branches - all ever changing but nourishing for the soul. It was also a very interesting use of materials.

Jenny Cope used natural materials from the forest floor to create Take a Closer Look, which created the most beautiful shadows on the plinth. With some parts of the vessels painted white, the borders between work, shadow, and the plinth they sat on were blurred, and beautifully dramatic.

A similar technique was employed by Fay McLeod in Looking Back, with natural materials encased in plaster, and drawings on x-rays, referencing both the fractured environment in need of repair and her former nursing profession.

Needing a break from the highway, I stopped in at Caboolture Regional Art Gallery, where I enjoyed the small gallery of work by Anna Turnbull, currently an artist in residence there.

Her ceramic pieces in the window initially looked like carved stone, or tusks - or mangrove roots?

Some ceramic pieces she paired with basketry - again, shadow played an important role in dramatising these works.

Her buckled ceramic tiles in frames were very evocative of the exhibition's theme of walking in the natural environment as was the detailed work in her ceramic vessels, with both having a sense of wandering tracks.

All in all a successful but exhausting day - I am not a great one with highway driving! How I miss just pulling over in the kombi for a quick, restorative lie down!