"At its heart my art practice is driven by the desire for life long learning. Living a ‘sea affected life’ (to borrow words from Mick Sowry) in the shadow of the ancient You Yangs, the landscape and the ocean around our beautiful town continues to be enough to keep me captivated as an artist and a seeker. I am still driven by what Goethe called a ‘delicate empiricism’ – that transformative way of encountering the natural world and the sustained effort to understand it’s phenomena through the powers of human perception. There is a fascination to me in capturing the atmospherics in these landscapes that have both a timelessness but also elements that are in constant flux. It is this tension between change and timelessness that keeps me coming back to the ocean. In this work I have been particularly focused on where the water meets the land – the shoreline or the rock ledge. In a sense the work is both about my very personal meetings with the shorelines I wander along as well as more literally about depicting the activity that happens where ocean meets the land. ‘Meetings with the Southern Ocean’ is a continuation of my interest in immersing myself in an empathetic, persistent and direct experience of place. The work is a frank celebration of the surging beauty of the Southern ocean – but it also contemplative and questions how we can open ourselves to a greater understanding of what the natural environment has to tell us. It urges us to suspend judgment, to abstain from interpretation and just participate in ‘seeing’ what is all around us and yet so often overlooked. You will see no trace of human intervention in this work. Our job is to simply to view, watch and breathe it in." - Natalie Anderson Exhibition runs 10 September – 3 October with Opening Celebrations Friday 11 September from 5:30pm. For a full exhibition listing, click here.
