Alice Wormald
Inversion Scenes
29 March - 29 April 2017
Read the catalogue essay by Lisa Sullivan >>
In this recent body of work, Alice Wormald continues her practice of using collaged found imagery and photographs as source material for her oil paintings. Pictures of landscapes, pottery, rock gardens, flowers and fabric are collected and then cut, dissected, inverted and flipped following an intuitive process to create fragmented compositions. Paying close attention to pattern, shadow, texture and form, she builds up carefully rendered layers that are permeated with a colourful rhythm informed by the quality of the printed images that she uses as source material. The scenes within the paintings are intimate but undetermined spaces that toy with the perception of surface and depth, of negative and positive space. This collapses the spatial logic of the painting, abstracting and disorienting the imagery within. Tenuous and incongruous, the spaces depicted betray a preoccupation with the ambiguity inherent in the painted surface and a concern with the pictorial construction of images. They are a search for dissonant forms which when combined, obscured and placed in a certain way adhere to a perceptive and poetic visual logic.
