ARTIST STATEMENT
 

Ria Green's work explores the resonance and affect of the environment on the spiritual, emotional and physical self. Working primarily through painting, Green attends closely to raw materials, colour and texture, treating pigment and surface as carriers of meaning, not just means to an image. Her practice presents abstracted representations of ephemeral moments of wonderment found in the natural world — the shift of light across water, the settling of weather, the brief clarity before a scene changes again.
 

Green's process is slow and material-led, building surfaces that hold traces of their own making — sediment and residue becoming part of the image rather than incidental to it. This attentiveness mirrors her subject matter: landscapes and atmospheres that are always changing, never fixed.
 

By capturing these visceral experiences of awe, time is suspended momentarily, enabling the sublime surfaces to reveal themselves. Green is drawn to the threshold — the point where a moment is still forming, not yet settled. This inquiry underpins exhibition Where Light Lingers, which holds a space between presence and disappearance.
 

In embracing the pictorial space, Green's paintings offer deeper contemplation and connection to the world around us, asking the viewer to slow down and notice what might be missed in passing.

“The material turns in Ria’s practice mirror moments of transition in the rhythmic cycles of the world. Moisture yielding to air; particles circulating, settling and separating…These moments are not captured as such, but they feel revisited, as if they have moved through the body to surface in pigment. The fleeting given duration. The liminal given form.”

- Dr. Clare Humphries
 

BIO

Ria Green is a multidisciplinary artist working and living in Naarm/Melbourne. Ria Green holds a Master of Fine Art at RMIT University, 2013 and a Bachelor of Art with Honours (Fine Art) at RMIT University 2007. Green has exhibited nationally and internationally since 2007, including exhibitions in Turin, Italy and Marnay-sur-Seine, France. Local exhibitions include Boom Gallery, Modern Times, Saint Cloche (Sydney), Counihan Gallery, Blindside Gallery and Seventh Gallery in Melbourne. Green has developed her sense of materiality and methods through several artist residencies including Cortex Frontal, Cortexrcult Cultural Association, Arriolos, Portugal, Tribu de Trueno, Bariloche, Argentina and Fusion Gallery, Inaudita Cultural Institution, Turin, Italy. Green’s work is held in numerous collections including State Library of Victoria, National Library of Australia, RMIT University and many private collections.

 

studio portrait image credit: Zoe Spawton