While Lake grew out of a direct connection with the gallery’s site, the idea was to explore not only the aesthetic potential, but also the rich narrative legacy such waterways offer visual artists. Still bodies of water are by nature unfathomable, seductive and treacherous; their mirror-like surfaces concealing as much as they reveal. Narcissus was doomed to find his capricious lover there. Many others – the enchanted swans, Middle Earth’s Watcher in the Water, and the sword Excalibur – made them home.
All of the contemporary Australian artists in this exhibition use aspects of landscape to invoke a hidden world. For them, the lake is no field of recreation; rather it is a secretive, often symbolic place. Alternately indomitable and wounded, it has been imbued with the artists’ feelings about cultural history, the environment, home and the self.
Pictured above: Murray Fredericks, Salt 108, 2006. Pigment print on cotton rag, 120 x 150 cm
Pictured below: Catherine Nelson, Cloverdowns 2010. Pigment prints, face- mounted on acrylic, 150 x 150cm
Museum of Art and Culture Lake Macquarie, 1A First Street, Booragul 2284 View in Google Maps
1A First Street , Booragul 2284