Rowena Boyd, Heliacal Rising, 2017. Encaustic on board, 100x85cm.
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.