Sydney Exhibition

Carmel Byrne

Scratch Art Space Director & Founder Carmel Byrne is exhibiting a range of landscape paintings & drawings for this show. Carmel has been working figuratively for the past five years however she worked in an abstract landscape language for a number of years before moving into her figurative works.

There is a selection of large and small paintings from a number of landscape series of works including Forecast, and her more recent Lake Mungo works Past and Present Future.

Artist Statement

Travel and journeys have been a constant theme in my work. Earlier work viewed the journey across space as an external experience. This current work (Forecast) is a more internal, personalised take on that theme where as well as depicting a journey or track across the canvas I bury the history of the journey into the picture. Layers of semi-transparent oil paint are built up to create a translucence that creates a visual memory where the conceptual and painted journey is inscribed into the picture plane.

I select environments or areas where I have lived. Previous series of work include Sydney Cove (Art on the Rocks), Manhattan Island (Satellite), and Bermuda (Two Worlds Clash). I begin with road maps and the painted imagery is formed and shaped by aspects of landscape and climate intermingled with my own experience of that place. For this series I have selected the road system along the Georges River, Sydney, which includes the suburb where I was raised.

I approach the landscape via multidimensional perspectives where I explore, dissect, edit, and reassemble aspects of an environment into a visual form that reflects land, weather and climate, intertwined with my own psychology. Colour relates to weather and mood, light emanates climatic seasons, and the compositions are derived from roads carved into that land. I use roads to metaphorically connect to past actions played out on land such as tracks created by animals and early residents that develop into roads.

In the series titled Forecast, meteorological symbols that indicate cloud cover are introduced. They are a visual pun for stages of the moon and the placement of three in each canvas balances the composition and implies a season. The perspective is raised and the surface compositional layer is a visual reference to a map of roads along the Georges River.

In previous work I used the grid to organise abstract images. For this series I wanted to move beyond the earth-bound grid yet acknowledge its significance in abstract painting, renaissance perspective, and the development of maps. I therefore embedded the grid into the early stages of the painting.

Over time and with many layers I work up the ground texturally and tonally until it launches up from the earth-grid into the space embracing it. Through this shift of perspective from land to the space above it the work includes the more ethereal elements such as climate and weather; elements that shape and interact with land.

The grid, subsumed into the early history of the paintings, lingers; just as colonial history lingers in contemporary Australia. It’s an act that plays with the notion that historical events are inscribed in space and traces of events exist in the present.

Carmel Byrne