Image above: August Carpenter The Actions of Storms; sleep movements 2021 monotype on 250gsm Velin Arches paper 120 x 80 cm
We are delighted to share Artist Profile’s feature on August Carpenter’s current solo exhibition, ‘The Actions of Storms’.
“Most of ‘The Actions of Storms; sleep movements’, 2021, is taken up by black space – the deep, uninterrupted darkness that monotypes can produce. About four fifths of the way up the panel, a horizon line hosts a set of silent, rectilinear forms, drawn into being gently as if through a mist. Below or in front of this land mass, a series of gestural strokes might represent the breaking of a wave on the darkness (they also might “represent” nothing but gesture).
According to a statement by the artist, Carpenter’s recent body of work, showing with Australian Galleries Melbourne as “The Actions of Storms,” makes an amalgam of the experienced and the imagined. The artist, that is, has crafted these sets of printed landscape images which teeter on the brink of abstraction both from documentation and speculation. The “documentation” to which these works respond includes photographs of Antarctic landscapes, the Douglas Mawson diaries, maps and other materials in the Keith Jackson Collection a the State Library of Victoria, which Carpenter was able to access during a research period funded by the Tate Adams Memorial Fellowship. This mediation between the documented – the historical – and the imagined – the future-tensed, or the conditional – is a fitting approach to work which aims to think through problems of loss, dissolution, and graspability in the context of the global climate crisis.”
To read the full article, visit the Artist Profile website.
August Carpenter’s solo exhibition is current until Saturday 18 December 2021. Click here to view the exhibition online.