SCALE: Exhibition

Exhibition

31 Mar

SCALE began with a constraint. Each of the eight painters invited to participate was asked to make two works: one large, one small. The parameters were simple and the interpretations were not. What emerged was an exhibition that had as much to say about perception and proximity as it did about landscape.

The concept had a formal elegance to it — a structured framework that unified the show without flattening the differences between artists. Hung in pairs throughout the gallery, the works created a rhythm of scale that rewarded close looking. A recurring idea surfaced across several of the artists’ responses and through conversations around the show: that the small work functioned like a window, a framed and intimate view onto a scene, while the large work placed you inside it entirely. Vista and crop. Distance and immersion. The pairing made both experiences more conscious.

Lucy Hersey made her paint from the ground up — literally. Working from her studio in Loch on Gurnai-kurnai Country in Gippsland, she hand-grinds locally collected earth pigments, washing and mulling them into paint that carries the specific mineral character of the places she’s painting. Her works for SCALE were meditations on light as a force rather than a quality: not just what illuminates a landscape but what sustains it, what makes growth possible, what pulls everything — seeds, bodies, seasons — toward the surface. Painting landscapes with the landscape itself, as she puts it.

Ksenia Shinkarenko’s response to the brief arrived from a memory of Japan. Sitting in a tearoom with a slightly open window overlooking a garden, she had noticed how the framed view created an intimacy with the outdoors that standing in the middle of the same garden might not. The constraint of scale, she found, does something similar — it doesn’t limit what we see so much as shift how we experience it. Her works for SCALE carried that quality of slowed, intentional looking.

Annie Everingham’s paired paintings reflected on the landscape of early motherhood as much as any external terrain — a return to the studio after the birth of her second child, working through the push and pull of that particular kind of scale: the expansive world outside and the deeply intimate space within. Ash Leslie’s works drew from the Illawarra Escarpment on Dharawal Country, influenced by the Illawarra flame trees whose scarlet flowers were used by the Wodi Wodi First Nations people for string, fishing nets and food. Amy Wright pursued the untamed and overlooked — landscapes where nature reclaims space from human intervention, her canvases functioning as Wunderkammern of sprawling plant life and fading horizons.

Ashleigh Holmes painted from an aerial perspective — a bird’s eye view of a moving tea tree lake, using dynamic brushstrokes and a palette of muted greens, browns and warm pinks to create what she described as a delicate yet powerful interpretation of landscape from above. Kate Sartori also worked from elevation, distorting colour and scale across paintings that reflect the landscape surrounding her home in Rye — familiar terrain made strange through a shift in vantage point, inviting viewers to see what they already know differently.

Hannah Nowlan’s works for SCALE continued her exploration of landscape as portal — fluid, transparent layering that allows elements to emerge and dissolve, echoing the shifting nature of place and the weighted histories it holds.

SCALE was supported by the Mornington Peninsula Shire Creative Grant Program and opened across the weekend of February 22 and 23 with a Kerri Greens wine pop-up. The exhibition also reached beyond the gallery walls — Hannah Nowlan and Lucy Hersey joined Katrina Waters on RPP FM’s Art to Arias segment to speak about the show, bringing the conversation about landscape, scale and material process to a local radio audience.