Stacey McCall's latest solo exhibition at Boom, Homesickness explores a recent trip to Paris in which Stacey immersed herself in both seeing and making art, whilst also reflecting her love of home and all that it brings. ⁠

This is Stacey's seventh solo with us and over time we have seen her work evolve in the most beautiful way. She has continued to challenge herself, pursuing a looser style of mark making which demonstrates a perfect harmony of restraint and gesture. We are so proud of Stacey and excited to hang this incredible body of work.


ARTIST STATEMENT

"A flickering image in my mind’s eye, the outline of something familiar, things on a table, a colour, a season, deeply heartfelt, catching you unaware, a whisper from home, the joy of experience mixed with the comfort of where you belong.

I recently spent the month of May in Paris, a long-awaited trip with Sue Tesoriero, a friend who is also a painter. We had been planning and saving for many years and then, there we were, gaping at Matisse, Delacroix, Corot, Manet…pinching ourselves often, are we really here? It was an incredible immersion into art where we wandered the galleries, took a million photos, and filled our sketchbooks with drawings and notes about what we were seeing, the light, the marks, all so overwhelming and amazing.
 

I wonder if all the art I saw in Paris has influenced this body of work, I guess it must have, maybe it has given me permission to be even more abstract in my marks, peering up close at Hockney or Matisse has livened my love even more for the expressive gestural mark. I think colour has also followed me home, still desaturated but finding its way through the layers of earth tones are now blues and reds and gentle lilacs.
 

There is something else about travel that I also love. It is those tiny moments that catch you off guard, a little image in your mind’s eye of something from home, nothing particular or special. Just a little flicker of light illuminating something familiar, I call it homesickness but not in a nostalgic way, just as a lovely reminder of what we are grateful for and where we belong. This show is dedicated to that feeling, that lovely yearning for home, that feeling of Homesickness."
 

BIO
 

After completing Fine art at RMIT, with a major in Gold and Silversmithing, Stacey worked as a bespoke jeweller for 15 years but eventually turned back to her true passion… painting. She now works full time from her garden studio in the inner Melbourne suburb of Kensington.

The intimacy of Stacey’s subject matter is intertwined with the scale of her work. Small vignettes of quiet moments captured with a robust yet gentle brushstroke, her sense of place and home expressed with tenderness, light and shadow observed, capturing the ephemera that sits unnoticed, still and silent in a busy home.

“I think more and more I am comfortable with leaving things a little raw but hopefully resolved, it’s difficult to know when to put the brush down but I think sometimes the less said the better”.