About the Artist

Daniel Sherington

As a young Australian artist, it is easy to see drawing subservient and invalidated to that of Australian painting. My practice is a response to this relationship, exploring the boundaries and interactions of drawing and painting within the context of the validated and commoditised ‘Australian’ image.

Continuing the artistic narrative established by the post-modernists, my work engages with a  visual vocabulary to explore socially responsive ideas and concepts. My work is rooted in drawing and draughtsmanship. All works stem from this cornerstone of drawing, as it exists as an artistic truth of mine.

Through the visual manipulation of iconographic qualities and artistic precedents, the lines between drawing and painting are blurred. The preferred Australian genre highlighted through the undulations and creases of the crushed can - evoking the idea of a ‘cultural landscape’. The Brett Whiteley iconised colour, Ultramarine Blue, being used as a greater representation for what can be considered an ‘Australian Palette’. The painting itself being viewed as the embodiment of the validated idea and concept – with this being translated into the concept being explicitly stated through painted text. The idea of the drawing becoming a vehicle for this idea, and in this light existing as the ‘canvas’ the paint lies on.

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• —   www.danielsherington.com

About the Artist

Jo Breneger

When I was a kid my mum loved to have a punt on the horses.  She would bring home ‘Turf Monthly’ and I would pore over the glossy centrefold of the winning racehorse. Hours were spent drawing and painting that horse. I remember a friend of my dads, an old plumber showing me how he drew a horse. I can still see his big gnarly hands carefully drawing the rump and belly with a texta. Funny the things that stay with you. 

When I left art school I began working for myself painting signs and murals. It seemed like a good use of my artistic skills to earn a living. It has been a lifetime of learning that beautiful craft and somedays I still feel like a beginner.

In recent years I have been spending a lot of time around horses. I find them to be very benevolent and healing creatures to be with. Once again I have found myself endlessly drawing and painting them trying to capture the beauty I feel around them.

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• —   Jo Breneger 'Show Pony'

About the Artist

Julie Paterson

"Coming up to Brisbane from my home in NSW always means visiting friends like Leesa, and having a quiet catch up. Typically I hang out and walk the streets, photographing and sketching the buildings and environment near where Leesa lives and works. Sometimes we go for a drive and she points out places that I might like. 

I consistently find much of the architecture of Brisbane delightful — being a textile designer by trade, the layering of pattern and texture always grabs my attention and imagination. Over the years I’ve taken to painting simple little compositions of what I’ve seen on found card or wood. When Leesa asked me what I’d like to put in the show, I said, my paintings of ‘Brisbane Architexture.’ It’s a good slip of the tongue that made Leesa laugh, so that’s what this ongoing series is called." 

Julie Paterson, 2018

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• —   juliepaterson.com.au

About the Artist

Kate Barry

Kate Barry is originally from Christchurch and with a degree in illustration, printing-making and graphic design, Kate enjoyed a hefty career in the book publishing industry, focusing on the design and illustration aspects of this field, before returning to full-time painting.

Immersing herself in the visceral stimulus and raw physicality of paint, Kate’s works are an intuitive disassemblage of the confines of our constant digitally stimulated lives. Painting is an almost primitive, spontaneous response to our natural surroundings and sensory internal dialogue. Works explore traces of nostalgia and the innate emotional re-engagement with the energy of nature that is all around us. Through paint on canvas, she breaks through the periphery into a raw terrain of bold brushwork and vitality of colour.  As we pass by we allow ourselves to be drawn in. 

In the last year, Kate Barry’s prolific painting practice has gone from strength to strength. Completing multiple commissions, selling work online and through retail boutiques, paintings showcased on television and interior design magazines and having multiple finalist placings in national prizes. This new exploration into process is a natural step forward for Kate to challenge the status quo of her successful painting career and develop the accompanying overarching concepts. 

About the Artist

Kay Watanabe

Kay Watanabe is a Brisbane-based visual artist working in the fields of printmaking and small sculptures, investigating what essentially makes us unique as humans and as individuals. Her work explores the relationship between humans and their environment and how people are a small existence within the vastness of nature and the universe. She also makes works themed around a person’s life and consciousness as accumulated memories and experiences. As a printmaker, she uses various printmaking techniques, sometimes independently and at other times combining more than two methods, to achieve desired effects. Recently she has been using the collagraph and drypoint printmaking techniques extensively as she’s found these techniques are effective in creating organic textures which she thinks directly appeal to the viewers’ senses. As well as extensively exhibiting her works and winning awards in Australia and overseas, Kay teaches printmaking through various organisations in Queensland and beyond.

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About the Artist

Kitty Horton

Brisbane based artist, Kitty Horton completed her Bachelor of Fine Art at Queensland College of Art. She has exhibited solo shows in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, along with group shows nationally throughout Australia and in Miami, Florida. Kitty's artworks are represented in private collections in Australia, New Zealand and France.

My artworks explore the materiality of a combination of oils, mixed media and drawing. As I am inspired by the American Minimalists, I investigate my daily surroundings through creating distorted shapes, forms and motifs. Mark making and the serendipitous accident extend the relationship between painting and drawing. I have recently engaged with spatial configurations within the landscape to provide compositional structures. Through drawing and painting, the juxtaposition of mediums enables me to express the atmosphere of experiencing the landscape. I initiate my artworks through the use of charcoal and further resolve my artworks with oil paint on board. As I resolve my artworks they are further pared back to a limited palette.

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• —   www.kittyhorton.com

About the Artist

Krista Berga

Auckland-born, Brisbane-based, Krista Berga works across sculpture, drawing, painting, text and installation. 

“In both form and content, Berga's works are acts of transgression and transformation ... palpable and in fact electrifying.” — David L. Clark

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• —   kristaberga.net
• —   saatchionline.com

About the Artist

Lesley Kendall

“When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else.” 

— Georgia O'Keefe

 An artist in residence of the Brisbane Botanic Gardens for two consecutive years, Lesley Kendall works with natural flora and fauna as subject matter across several mediums. Watercolour and ink are the primary medium, while paper sculptures of insects, plants and birds accompany the still life garden created to mimic the collections of natural life found around Brisbane. The work appears to have been done in several stages as the artist’s hand is visible in the layers of watercolour chapters that permeate the thick paper works. The muted tones and soft edges of watercolours lend to a serene and tranquil reflection, and in the artist’s own words, “plants are observed as objects of contemplation.”

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• —   lesleykendall.com
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About the Artist

Stella Danalis

Contemporary artist Stella Danalis investigates the interplay between colour and form through the pictorial language of geometric abstraction. The purity of geometric form offers her an avenue by which she can nurture her instinctual disposition toward colour. Stella's polychromatic, architectonic constructions float and collide, hug and repel, allowing geometric narratives to unfold between colours and shapes. Her ripe geometries ground the viewer through their colour and form.

Stella's colour fields are a dramatic change from her former creative oeuvre as an award-winning illustrator and graphic designer. For over three decades her graphic eye has brought publications, novels, posters, packaging, advertisements and brand identities to life. Her children’s picture books have been nominated for children’s picture book of the year and published in a number of languages and her illustrations have featured in many of Australia’s top magazines and newspapers. Stella's work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally and published in Australian and International journals. She has also had the opportunity to pass on her knowledge and passion to others as a lecturer at Griffith University. Her dedication to the creative process has seen her receive over 100 awards and honors for her work. Her work is held in private and public collections throughout Australia.

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About the Artist

Susan Lincoln

Susan Lincoln is an established contemporary visual artist with a rich connection to regional and rural Australia, and the women in Lincoln’s family who have shared experiences of these landscapes. It is the nostalgia, unique environment, and familial connection to these places of importance that has left a signature mark on the majority of Lincoln’s works over the last decade. Lincoln’s oeuvre exhibits the lived experience of the bonds of motherhood and family; from the memories of her mother’s crystal bracelet which would reflect light, to the heartbeat performance video enacted by Lincoln and her daughter, the works always have a root hooked in the ideologies of the feminine and plays with the idea of secular spirituality. It is these themes which inform the works in this latest exhibit. 

To be in the presence of Lincoln’s work is to understand the artist’s desire to promote an experiential or immersive experience, one which is rooted in philosophy, memory and reflection; much akin to works by contemporary French Conceptual artist Christian Boltanski. Where Boltanski used similar materials and conceptual frameworks to form a recreation of the past, Lincoln’s work ventures to ascend toward a greater understanding and ultimate reflection of the past, to clarify ideas and transform heavy philosophies into objects and experiences of beauty for the future. The incredible lightness of being invites contemplation and connectivity to a selection of works on paper, video, small and large-scale sculpture,  and invites intimacy and viewer participation with the work.

The incredible lightness of being held at Side Gallery is an explorative landing strip for a larger body of work which will tour Australia in 2019–2020. 

—  Download Susan Lincoln's CV

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About the Artist

Tiel Seivl-Keevers

Texture, line and colour are elements that echo as I work through the passage of developing a blank surface to a finished image. I build layers. I erase. I assemble. I alter. I scratch and carve, then stitch and mend until I am satisfied that I have captured the atmosphere and intricacies that nature provides.

Exploring the physical journey of being within a place that can provoke memory; mapping points and connections. Expressing sensations of how nature impacts our emotions. The expression of air, water, earth, fire, smell, sound and touch collide onto one surface where the audience can see all these layers.

A career as a Graphic Designer, Illustrator, University and TAFE teacher in Visual Arts, Design and Multimedia in Queensland and Victoria.

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