Alice Wormald
Ordinary Picture
26 February - 29 March 2014
Ordinary Picture continues Alice Wormald’s investigation into the contemporary landscape through the selection, manipulation and collage of natural imagery as a basis for her oil paintings and watercolours. Using nature photography and natural spaces from her collection of found imagery, the works explore formal and conceptual concerns derived from art history and the abstraction of nature and landscape. While the paintings mimic the smoothness of the photographic surfaces from which they are derived, they vibrate with a visual conversation between scale, composition, colour and texture. Wormald’s paintings mediate her experience of space and nature through a controlled sense of photorealism, grounded in concerns around the act of painting and the physicality of paint itself. These works effect a displacement through which the familiar appears strange, and are not concerned with narrative or meaning, but are a meditation on visual language and the space around us, the sublime, the magic and the majestic.
Alice Wormald completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts with first class honours at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne in 2011. In 2014 her work will be included in Vertigo, touring to various locations with Asialink. Solo exhibitions include Occluded View at Daine Singer (2012), In the Unreal Air at Blindside (2012), and Wayside & Hedgerow at Shifted Gallery (2010). She has participated in group exhibitions including New Horizons at Gippsland Art Gallery in Sale (2013) and Debut VII at Blindside (2011). She has received the Fiona Myer Award, the Casama Group Award and has been a finalist in awards such as The Macquarie Group Emerging Artist Prize, The Banyule City Prize for Works on Paper and the John Leslie Prize for Landscape Painting. Her work is held in collections including the Gippsland Art Gallery, Fiona Myer Collection and Joyce Nissan Collection as well as private collections in Australia, New Zealand and Europe.
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