Curator Sheridan Palmer has written an insightful review for Memo Review of Heather Shimmen’s solo exhibition The Sun Shining Ultravioletly One Day Upon the Protean Sea, which ran from 11 November 2023 to 11 February 2024, at La Trobe regional Gallery, Victoria.
‘A prolific printmaker, Heather Shimmen literally cuts deep into her medium as well as into the psyche of the bush. Drawing against the European model, she creates microcosms of flora and fauna, with insects, rodents, quadrupeds, birds, and reptiles populating her large menageries.’
She attributes her alchemic use of materials to the experimentation that her teachers Len Crawford, George Baldessin, and Andrew Sibley encouraged during her student years at RMIT in the late 1980s. She has since pushed the boundaries of printmaking, embellishing and politicising her imagery. Her constructed three-dimensional cut-outs are patterned, embossed, and perforated, with tangled threads, feathers, and shimmering organza that adds a sense of feminising exotica to her installations.’
– excerpts from Sheridan Palmer’s article in Memo Review.
Read the full article here
Image above: Rona Green Petal 2023 hand coloured linocut edition 57 38 x 28 cm
Photography by Tim Gresham
Printmaker Rona Green has curated a group exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ballarat,
Whereabouts: Printmakers Respond, inviting 56 emerging and established artists from across Victoria to submit a work that responds to their relationship to place, country and home.Australian Galleries artists Sue Anderson, David Frazer, Rona Green, Kyoko Imazu, Glenn Morgan, Heather Shimmen and Deborah Williams all have works in the exhibition.
Whereabouts: Printmakers Respond
Now Open
Art Gallery of Ballarat
40 Lydiard Street, Ballarat VIC
Exhibition Launch
Saturday 16 December 2023
Free entry. All welcome!
Exhibition current until 4 February 2024
For further information on this exhibition, visit The Art Gallery of Ballarat’s website here
Glenn Morgan Cats 2023 linocut edition 57 26 x 28 cm
Photography by Tim Gresham
Image above: Heather Shimmen Eye of the Beholder 2011 linocut and watercolour on paper 3/10 128 x 100 cm
Congratulations to Heather Shimmen on her upcoming solo exhibition, The sun shining ultravioletly one day upon the protean sea, at LaTrobe Regional Gallery.
The creative practice of acclaimed printmaker Heather Shimmen is a world occupied by a vivid assemblage of characters from both Western mythology and Australian history, dancing a precarious line between truth and fantasy.
Exhibition Open:
11 November 2023 – 11 February 2024
Latrobe Regional Gallery
Gallery 1 & 2, Ground Floor
Exhibition Opening Night: Saturday 11 November, 5 – 9pm
Learn more here:
https://latroberegionalgallery.com/project/the-sun-shining-ultravioletly-one-day-upon-the-protean-sea/