Sydney Contemporary
- Mary Tonkin

8 – 11 September 2022

STAND F13 Carriageworks
245 Wilson Street, Eveleigh NSW 2015

Opening Night: Thursday 8th September 5.30pm – 9pm
Thursday 8: 11am – 5pm, Friday 9: 12pm – 5pm
Saturday 10: 11am – 6pm, Sunday 11: 11am – 5pm

FOR EVENT INFORMATION AND TICKETS CLICK HERE

My work begins with the premise that painting can convey something of the sensual envelope of experience as it unfolds over long periods of time – bird calls marking out distances, wattle blossom and moss perfume, light or rain bejewelling a shrub, a memory that arises unbidden, the full gamut of sensations. I work en plein air because I’m most at home in the bush, it is where I can be most myself, fully open and responsive to what is around me. I am not painting a view of the bush, I am within it, acknowledging the presence of each interwoven form and attempting to find a poetic language to convey that particular presence and its effect on me.

The central work for this Sydney Contemporary exhibition, Ramble, Kalorama (2017-19) is the culmination of more than ten years of drawing and painting around the problem of how to make a work that conveys the immersive and somewhat episodic experience of being in the bush. Even if I’m standing in one spot to draw or paint, I move about; my point of view, relationship to forms, light and the seasons all change. The previously seen impinges on the present and all the internal stuff I bring to it is in flux. I ramble about and try to make sense of it all, in a kind of ecstatic reverie. This work of 21 panels, each 180 x 90 cm, was painted en plein air over the course of eighteen months, in an area of about 8 x 10 square metres, much of it a kind of log corral of long fallen trees. It is just a little way into the bush from a spring-fed dam on my family’s rare bulb farm – where I grew up and where I have my studio. This painting is not a continuous panorama, but rather it loops through the space, doubling back and repeating forms, overlapping various points of view, ending with what is, in reality, the entry to this little haven, a kind of somersault of tree ferns.

I live and work amongst the tall trees of the Corhanwarrabul / Dandenong Ranges to the east of Naarm/ Melbourne. I love this bush. I love its particular chaos and mouldering smell, I love its intimacy – how it envelops and embraces, and its grandeur – the sense of a tree timescale and natural rhythms beyond human ken. I love that sometimes it sparkles and dances, at other times is quiet and almost withdrawn. I’m not sure where or what I’d be without its sustaining presence. We all need these natural wellsprings.

Mary Tonkin for Sydney Contemporary, July 2022