Pauline FRASER 'One Hot Summer’s Day Dreaming' 2021 aquatint, 14.9 x 19.6 cm [image]
Image:
Pauline FRASER
One Hot Summer’s Day Dreaming    2021
aquatint
14.9 x 19.6 cm [image]

17th Dec 2021 – 13th Feb 2022
Simpson Gallery

In Contemplating Nature, nationally regarded artist Pauline Fraser explores and exposes the Lurg landscape which surrounds her home studio through an expansive body of prints and ceramic sculpture.

While environmental concerns associated with this specific north east Victorian landscape have driven her practice for multiple decades, the genesis for this body of work was a heightened emotional response brought about by two powerful converging forces.

Firstly, there was the recent extreme bushfire season which devastated Victoria’s north east. Fraser speaks of the amplified drama of the landscape in a ‘normal’ Summer, “when the intense colour and light sculpts and shapes massive hills.”  There has been no more dramatic Summer in recent memory than that of 2019-2020.

That bushfire season, however, quickly dovetailed into a second evocation: a global pandemic and its succession of lockdowns. This both forced and allowed Fraser—like many others—to spend more time at home and forge an even closer connection to local surrounds, to explore it in even greater detail.

Against this emotional backdrop, Fraser has produced a body of work which reflects the drama of the Lurg landscape, highlighting its ferocity and fragility. She invites viewers into Lurg, into the space with which she is so familiar. She gives them an experience of the light and of the wind; the silence and how it is interrupted by the cracking of lightning or a crackling underfoot; of the vast emptiness in which life is found on closer inspection; of the distance to everything and a closeness to the heavens.

She explains, “The geography of Lurg in Summer is starkly and dramatically beautiful…and for an artist, a constant fascination. Living high on this hillside I am closer to the sun and the moon, which makes for greater exposure to the often-unsettled weather patterns, where lightning can strike these hill tops with terrifying ferocity and have caused fire and, where I imagine, the sun is ripping the grasses from the land, whilst the night moon feels like a constant companion. It is a place which exudes quietness, where there is both a silence and sound of silence.”