Recreation

Future Exhibitions

24 September – 14 November 2010

• Lake
• Nicola Hensel: The Patient Labyrinth

Lake

Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery overlooks the largest coastal saltwater lake in this country. Lake acknowledges this obvious connection with the gallery’s site, referencing not only the aesthetic potential, but also the rich narrative legacy such waterways continue to afford visual artists.

Still bodies of water are by nature unfathomable, seductive and treacherous, their mirror-like surfaces concealing as much as they reveal.

For the contemporary Australian artists in this exhibition – including GW Bot, Ian Burns, John Conomos, Nici Cumpston, Murray  Fredericks, Louise Hearman, Catherine Nelson, Tobias Richardson, Troy Ruffels – the lake is no field of recreation, rather it is a strange and secretive place.

Alternately indomitable and wounded, it is imbued – haunted if you like – with the artists’ own feelings about cultural history, the environment, home and the self.

A gallery project curated by Meryl Ryan & Malcolm Smith, Program Manager, Australian Centre for Photography.

Murray Fredericks, Salt 108 [detail] 2006
120 x 150cm, pigment on cotton rag
image courtesy the artist &
Arc One Gallery, Melbourne.

Nicola Hensel: The Patient Labyrinth

Refined and poetic, Nicola Hensel’s work is directed by the observation of everyday botanical and domestic  details. For this exhibition, the Hunter-based artist is producing a virtuosic collection of work that includes monumental finely worked pencil drawings and collage, chalk wall drawing and finger painting on the floor .

A gallery project curated by Meryl Ryan

Artist Nicola Hensel at work in
Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery
Sculpture Park.

Nicola Hensel, Fig (ocean) 2010,
ink on board, 140 x 120cm,
courtesy the artist &
Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane.