NOVEMBER 1-17
Leo Cremonese, Gabrielle Bates, Raphe Coombes and Bridget Baskerville
In Sky Mountain River Bush, Raphe Coombes, Bridget Baskerville, Gabrielle Bates and Leo Cremonese weave journeys, memories, rituals and Animist thinking into diverse materials, both traditional and innovative, to express their experience of the landscape.
On North Rivers bushwalks, Raphe Coombes delves into the landscape’s lyrical rhythm, uncovering its energy, vitality, and connections. On Wiradjuri Dabee land in Kandos, NSW, Bridget Baskerville invites the landscape itself to create her works; the acidic waters of mine site tailings dams etch traumatic memories into the surface of submerged steel plates. Gabrielle Bates assembles layers of everyday cardboard to explore the dynamic patterns and relationships between mountains, fields, swamps and star-filled skies. And Leo Cremonese channels his ritualistic and meditative dances with the bush into layers of vibrant oil paint on canvas.
These four regional artists share a profound love and respect for the landscape as a living, sentient entity, realising the seamless unity between person and land. Such awareness, on a larger scale, is essential for establishing ‘right relation’ with our planet, where the interconnectedness of all beings centres on responsibility and reciprocity in relational kinship.
OPENING EVENT – Saturday November 2nd from 2pm – With special guest speaker Peter Swain (Wiradjuri)
LEO CREMONESE
Leo Cremonese is an abstract painter and multi-disciplinary artist based in Kandos.
Leo’s paintings are a direct bodily experience of the landscapes around his home, he seeks to relate to the bush, mountains, atmosphere and waterways at a sub-atomic level – a realm where all matter is harmoniously resonating in a perpetual ballet. This symphony of movement is the most basic structure of the cosmos. Leo performs ritualistic deep listening and dancing, in the landscape, before taking that dance into the studio, transposing his day’s experiences onto the canvas.
Image: “Songs of the Mountain”, oil on linen, 77cm x 84cm, 2024
GABRIELLE BATES
Gabrielle Bates is a multi-disciplinary artist from Kandos. She has worked with cardboard for over 15 years as it is a material that embodies the qualities of impermanence and change.
Her work for Gang Gang Gallery draws inspiration from the local rural environment, contemplating how geological time and movement subtly alters the shape of the landscape. Fields, rocks, rivers, forests, swamps, creeks and skies come into relation through mutual exchange, friction, and other complex forces. Gabrielle works with similar dynamics in her own process by cutting, tearing, peeling, heating and reconfiguring the cardboard until patterns are identified and relationality is established.
Image: “Mountain Rock”, mixed media, 46cm x 60cm, 2024.
RAPHE COOMBES
My series of works is connected to Northern NSW Country of the Gumbaynggir people land spreading from The Nambucca River in the south to the Clarence River in the north and the Great Dividing Range in the West
Built from journeys and snap shot moments in my parenting life, the Beautiful touch of a learning toddlers’ vocabulary describes the images.
Image: “I Built the flowers here”, Oil and graphite on board, Raw Tasmanian Oak frame, 30h x 32w.
BRIDGET BASKERVILLE.
Bridget Baskerville is an early career artist, based between Canberra (Ngunawal Ngambri Country) and her hometown of Kandos, NSW (Dabee Wiradjuri Country). Baskerville’s work examines socio-environmental relationships in Australia and the impact of colonisation, extraction and agriculture on systems of water. At the core of her current practice is the process of submerging metal plates in bodies of water and leaving them to corrode. This method serves as a means toemphasise the agency of water and non-human entities within these systems, as evidenced by the texture and marks of corrosion that develop on the plate’s surface.
Image: TBA