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10 October to 1 November 2008
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City & Coast is an exploration of environment. Two respected artists, Ruth Faerber and Catherine Kay, work in contrasting styles to portray Sydney from coastal and CBD viewpoints. Both artists are mapping the land, the same land that many Sydneysiders pass daily without taking in its subtleties.
Ruth Faerber is an innovator in the use of paper and printmaking techniques and over 160 of her works are in collections including those of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Mosman Art Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art and the National Gallery of Australia. Now in her 86th year Faerber's impressive body of work has continued to evolve... she has adopted up to date technology processes, a medium with low physical demand.
Faerber has said, "My artistic journey has always involved me in finding the appropriate means to express my feelings about ‘the life force'. Now that I am not travelling abroad any more my focus has been drawn to the heart of Sydney, where I spend so much time, and its beauty and vitality which I love."
These latest archival ink-jet prints present a sense of playfulness capturing both intimate spaces and iconic images. In an elevator shaft where cold steel contrasts with warm orange light, Faerber's image represents textures and geometry found in architecture. Her modern images depict a ‘living' environment where one can feel the cool of the shade in Lavender Bay while watching the last of the sun sink past the Harbour Bridge.
In 2006 Catherine Kay developed watercolour coastal profiles for the exhibition ‘Any News of Laperourse' presented at the State Library of New South Wales. This French-Australian artist used her 31ft sailing boat Sylphide as a studio workshop on the Tasman Sea where she compiled profiles of the eastern coast of Australia. Reminiscent of early navigators, Kay has created contemporary views combining navigational observations with an aesthetic layering of quiet shoreline profiles.
Each work is made up of four to six detailed profiles which emanate a sense of beauty and tranquillity. From cliffs to grassy hillsides, some profiles contain only distant silhouettes, the point where land is just detectable from sea. As Kay sailed in towards land these silent forms begin to take the shapes of trees, beaches and cities, enhanced by the hues of cloudy skies or pink sunsets.
Kay describes the outcome of her meticulous method as "transferring paint to paper, I can reduce the vastness of the continent to a micro world barely visible from five nautical miles out to sea." The coast thus becomes the focus in a quest to combine skills of navigation with talented art making.
City & Coast is an exhibition that features Sydney and its nearby environs capturing the nuances of the technology driven city and the nautical culture of a harbour city.
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