NATURALCULTURAL NIGHTS II
Layering the Landscape: Ecosystems of Awe

NaturalCultural Nights is delighted to present its second exhibition: Layering the Landscape: Ecosystems of Awe, a six artist group show featuring Ava Haggas, Jemima Moore, Joe Grieve, KV Duong, Suhaylah H. and Thomas Allen. 

 

These artists are brought together by their tendency to dismantle intricate patterns and textures within landscapes, finding awe and inspiration in individual layers that make up the vista — segments which are then stitched back together in new ways, reimagined. For Ava Haggas and Jemima Moore, these layers are iterative, exuberant patterns that draw directly from art historical influences. Meticulously embellished, Haggas’ tableaus draw upon the decorative legacy of Art Nouveau, using repetitive mark-making in pencil: though mathematically precise, these motifs are liberated by sensuous harmonies of colour and form. Jemima Moore’s paintings are also characterised by distinctive patterns: monsoons of sprawling colour and line that distil Old Master paintings to their formal qualities. Intuitive and spontaneous, the relationship of these marks to each other allude not just to their source image, but to natural ecosystems. An emphasis on sensation brought about by nature, rather than its representation, is also present in Joe Grieve’s sublime landscapes, wherein vivid, undulating forms give voice to nature's intangible rhythms: layers of dense texture and saturated colour encompass the vastness and intensity of experience. For KV Duong, material layers become both personal and political. Working with the medium of latex and full body action painting, Duong explores colonial histories through a strikingly intimate and gestural language, achieving symbiosis between skin and material. Suhaylah H. and Thomas Allen turn their exploration further inward to depict scenes wavering between dreamscape and landscape. Suhaylah’s compositions converge layers of geographic and archaeological palimpsests with mystical mirage, recording the multiplicity of stories, real and imagined, buried within the earth’s sites. Thomas Allen’s mesmerising canvases also tell of anthropological narratives, rendering long-forgotten tales of foraging in polychromatic pattern, vacillating between the language of the old and new world.

As a whole, Layering the Landscape: Ecosystems of Awe showcases the expansive possibilities in contemporary landscape painting and drawing. A delicately formed web of marks, colours and texture becomes a robust tapestry of landscape, layered both in technique and vision, shaped as much by the complexity of each artist’s inner world as by the external landscape around them.

​

Anna Moss - Art Historian | Writer | Curator

​

Preview the Naturalcultural Nights founding text above