leave no shadow
amy wright
30 may–16 jun
BSG Projects is pleased to present a vibrant body of work by Amy Wright.
Riverside landscapes, lush overgrown thickets and undisturbed natural settings provide the backdrop for Leave No Shadow, Amy Wright’s second exhibition with Brunswick Street Gallery. Thickets of wild growth, often mislabelled as overgrown, appear abandoned or suggest an atmosphere of neglect–however it is in these pockets of exuberant natural growth where an order exists unaffected by human interaction and is in turn given an opportunity to thrive.
As AA Milne once posed, “Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them”, affirming that every plant has its place in its natural setting."
With a respect for place, standing back and watching on, these works are composed of many fragments and memories following periods of contemplation and close observation of the river’s edge. Piecing these back together in her studio, Wright works to harness these moments in quick sequence around the studio – following a similarly forward action, as if viewing in real time the movement along the river bank during a mornings’ walk – each work is an amalgamation of various memories that together reconstruct the landscape along the river's edge.
The works are playfully nostalgic in their palettes, with a jostling of white washed pastels and saturated colour. These pieces evoke the feelings of recollection typical to memory; where some areas are muted and foggy, others are crisp with intention and surety. Memory has translated the warmth of morning sunlight through iridescent yellows and the stillness of dawn imbued through mauves and blues.
In this exhibition, Wright suggests that to see the truth of a landscape, you need to stand back and allow the landscape to come to you, to allow its elements to reveal themselves to you through a sensory experience. Observe, and leave no shadow.
Based on the Bellarine Peninsula, VIC, Amy Wright is a prolific multidisciplinary artist with a diverse background in Painting and Drawing, Surface Pattern Design and Floral Artistry. Wright has formal training in in the Fine Arts from VCA and a BA (Honours) in Textile Design from RMIT.
Working in mixed media–predominately oil, acrylic and prismacolour pencil–her painting methodology is reminiscent to that of collage, where the whole is made up of cropped fragments, and she playfully toys with the idea of hiding and revealing. Pattern, shape, texture and colour are core to her practice and are used to create a sensory narrative of the landscape.
Photo: Nikita Cherry
“Essential to my practice is my immersion into the landscape. A desire to breathe in the space, be aware of the sensations of my surroundings and unearth the details, textures and patterns that emerge through exploration. I’m intrinsically interested in the unseen, or unnoticed, often undesirable aspects of a garden or landscape. The untamed areas where nature has returned to its authentic rudimentary state.”
– Amy Wright