OPENING EVENT Wednesday 20 March from 6:00pm at ANCA Gallery. Free to attend, no bookings required.

‘What Remains’ consists of a series of small sensory objects that viewers can peer into to discover illusory spaces of texture, movement, light and smell. Through this work Michelle considers the ‘essence of life’ that remains in vacated spaces and has attempted to capture a fragment of these real and imagined sensory experiences in her work.

Michelle developed this work while living in Thailand and travelling around empty houses on the Seto Islands of Japan. Wandering through each country she recorded textures, surfaces, debris and indications of recent presence and spent time in vacated and old spaces.

She actively attempted to hold on to the feeling of presence in empty rooms and was most intrigued by the simultaneously living and lifeless state of each space. In her work Michelle says ‘I aim for the interior spaces of the objects to be both unsettling and attractive, to replicate a sense of the uncanny that I felt in these vacated spaces.’ 

Michelle Day is a sculptor and installation artist based in Canberra. She develops her work predominantly from silicone, fabric, fibers, found objects, steel, glass and light.

Michelle graduated with honors from the ANU School of Art in 2009. From 2015-2017 she resided in Thailand and completed a Master of Fine Arts at Chiang Mai University.

Michelle has exhibited nationally in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Ballarat, and internationally in Japan, New Zealand and Thailand. She is the recipient of several prestigious grants from the Australia Council for the Arts, artsACT, The Freedman Foundation and The Australian Embassy, Thailand.

michele-day.com

OPENING EVENT Wednesday 27 February from 6:00pm at ANCA Gallery. Free to attend, no bookings required.

Embodied Experiences is an exhibition by three young woman artists showing highly personal work in celebration of International Women’s Day. In this exhibition. Kira Godoroja-Prieckaerts, Elise Stanley and Isabelle Mackay-Sim explore individual elements of the feminine experience which will be brought together to offer a window into the complexities of inhabiting a female body.

Kira Godoroja-Prieckaerts is a Canberra-based artist working in the disciplines of drawing, printmaking and painting. Her works explore social issues from a personal perspective. She enjoys moving beyond the traditional use of mediums and allows the subject matter to have a great influence on the expression of mark making. Kira has been involved in group exhibitions at the 8th National Print Symposium at the National Gallery of Australia, The Left Hand Gallery, and a solo show at Honky Tonks. Her works have also appeared several times in Demos Journal. She graduated from the ANU School of Art and Design in 2017.

Isabelle Mackay-Sim is a 2018 Honours graduate from the ANU school of art, and has been exhibiting sculptural ceramics in Canberra for 4 years. Her practice examines society’s preoccupation with the body and the gendered aspects of this cultural obsession. Isabelle’s work utilises the material qualities of clay and glaze to evoke the figure and elicit a visceral response to rich textural surfaces.

Elise Stanley is a print-based artist located in Canberra, Australia. Elise is a recent graduate of the Australian National University School of Art and Design with a major in Print-media and Drawing. Elise’s work references the figure across several drawing and print techniques in order to describe her personal and feminine experience.

All of the artists in Embodied Experiences are recent graduates from the ANU SoAD. This exhibition highlights their shared interest in exploring the feminine experience and the personal as political.

OPENING EVENT Wednesday 6 February from 6:00pm at ANCA Gallery. Free to attend, no bookings required.

Waves of Honey and Other People’s Houses at ANCA Gallery this February presents new works by local artist Rowena Boyd. This exhibition is comprised of a body of abstract, encaustic paintings that operate in the visceral sweet spot that language can never quite perfectly articulate; the pre-verbal glue that binds together material resonance, instinct, gut feeling, and sensory curiosity.  

This exhibition is comprised of a body of large-scale, abstract, encaustic paintings designed to fascinate and tantalise the senses. Dissecting what painting, particularly abstraction, can reveal about knowledge, perception and sensory experience, the works explore questions about multisensory perceptual processes, with emphasis on the links between vision and haptic experience.

A selection of large-scale, abstract, encaustic paintings that will fascinate and tantalise the senses. By exploring questions about multisensory perceptual processes, with an emphasis on the links between vision and haptic experience, Boyd’s work dissects what painting, particularly abstraction, can reveal about knowledge, perception and sensory experience.

Rowena Boyd The consuming and visually seductive tactile colour fields Boyd creates resonate within the body both viscerally and at one’s fingertips. Crafted through a process of accreting thousands of brush-strokes of thin, colourful molten beeswax upon a support, her delicate surfaces suggest gravity, skin, pressure, liquid, solid, and molten forms. These surfaces prompt the viewer to think about physical sensations and material ambiguities while provoking the desire to touch by stimulating sensory intimacy, curiosity and pleasure.

Pushing the boundaries of what can be done with encaustic paint as a material, Boyd employs the vernacular of painterly abstraction to explore a more fluid, multimodal concept of the senses. She is fascinated by the scientific and phenomenological underpinnings of sensory integration and separation, while being drawn to the freedom of, and potential for, art to examine these peculiarities of experience.

rowenaboyd.com