CROSS COUNTRY
Turner Galleries ENGINE ROOM
6th OCT - 4th NOV 2017
407 William St Northbridge WA
An annotation of landscape, a shorthand writing, a synthesis of experience.
Melissa Boughey gathers her raw material while out driving, walking or camping.
Time spent immersed in the landscape, drawing en plein air, is intrinsic to her experience and provides the framework for the development of paintings in her bush studio.
CROSS COUNTRY shows an insight into Boughey’s working process. A multilayered response to her intimate connection with land and interpretation of place. The daily dog walk, a recent camping trip, the feeling of the desert, are experiences that may come to the fore and be ripe for excavation. Works on paper, including a 4 metre drawing produced en plein air while camping, show an exploratory searching for a unique and honest language for writing the land. Visceral works on board in oil and beeswax allow the materiality of substance and substrate to create intuitive works from a seemingly random mark-making process until a memory of landscape emerges.
“Each work is a journey in itself, a moving through the landscape, a psychological terrain to traverse. Like walking up a hill with the landscape slowly revealing itself, the painting reveals itself to me during the process.” Melissa Boughey