NICHOLAS HUTCHESON : Quarry Exhibition at Dickerson Gallery Sydney - August 2009

About the Works in the Exhibition

Details:
Where: Dickerson Gallery, Syney Australia
When: 19th August 2007 to 6th September 2009
Address: 34 Queen Street, Woollahra Sydney, Australia
ph: (02) 9363 3358
www.dickersongallery.com.au

Statement
This is my second series of figures that act as containers for layers of drawing, colour and texture; vessels that hold anatomical landscapes within. I lay down layers of pencil, then smudge smear and partially erase them with paint. Armed with a trusty cake slice and ancient bread knife courtesy of the local junk shop, I then scrape back through the layers. I think I’m exploring the line between painting with drawing, and drawing with paint: I’m enamoured of the way that, when you draw onto a surface, you make an impression that remains even after more layers are added and others worn back. With paint, it can run, dribble, splatter leaving organic marks, weathering a surface or it can be used to erase, obscure, define.

I sometimes think of the work as an old fashioned school blackboard, in the sense that it is worked on, and seemingly wiped clean at the end of the day, But over time, the once pristine black turns to muted grey, revealing traces of the months of ideas, writing, information. In that way, my work is about time and process and history Last year I journeyed to the Antarctic on an Australian Antarctic Division Arts Fellowship. It was perhaps inevitable that the place would seep into my work in ways I couldn’t anticipate. Mesh like patterns evolved to represent shattered rocks of the landscape. The slow absorption of the old station buildings back into the landscape, the relentless attack of the weather on the wood, bitumen and steel of their construction, bright colours reduced to subdued tones; with these new works, I’ve moved toward a more muted palette.

Some days, it feels like my process resembles a spiral without end; rather than creating something each time I visit the studio, I obliterate the previous days work and must start again.