Amy Dynan: Artist Statement & Bio

"I use the framework of beauty to explore the relationship between humanity and nature. My large-scale pastel paintings merge photorealism with abstract sensibilities to document moments of sublimity, transition and fragility in nature. The dynamics of light and dark work as a metaphor for the opposing forces in nature and in ourselves, creating landscapes that hover between land and sky, material and ethereal.

For me, drawing is a lens through which the spectrum of our existence is revealed, and a means to marvel at how lucky we are to feel it fully. To this end my work documents nature in flux and celebrates the beauty of what we stand to lose.”  

Amy Dynan is an award-winning artist, renowned for her nuanced balance between conceptual rigour and classical drawing skills. She completed her Master of Contemporary Art and Master of Fine Arts at Sydney College of the Arts in 2017, developing a strong conceptual framework of beauty as a means to explore human relationships with the natural world.

“As a visual artist, research can offer a deeper, more profound connection to the significance of one’s own art practice in a field beyond the studio. I knew that my passion for drawing, combined with rigorous institutional and art world scrutiny and support would provide the necessary framework to further my aesthetic.”

Dynan has held two sell out solo exhibitions at Stanley Street Gallery, ‘Water’ in 2019 and ‘Skytalk’ in 2021. Dynan has been a finalist in the Dobell Drawing Prize the Adelaide Perry Drawing Prize and the Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize. She has been selected for art residencies in France, Norway and Iceland (2018), Hill End (2017, 2020), Mornington Peninsula (2020) and Bundanon Trust (William Fletcher Scholarship) (2024).

Amy Dynan: CV November, 2023 Download

Toni Messiter: Artist Statement & Bio

I am inspired by classical painting and portraiture, feelings of ambiguity, light and shadow. I am particularly interested in enigmatic compositions, raising questions between reality and illusion and creating a sense of uncertainty between the viewer and the figures depicted. I am interested in this dialogue of ‘who is looking at who’ between the audience and the painted subjects, which for me is tied up in my own reflection of my past; of me looking at these characters I’ve painted, and their gaze looking back at me. I feel an immediacy in their observation and strong sense of attachment to them, yet also I am an outsider to the canvas. It’s as if my painted characters challenge and speak to me, the creator and in turn the viewer. It is a kaleidoscope of memory, portraits of the past or the framing of a life, but at the same time questions of who is looking at who in the paintings confuse interpretation and subjectivity.

Toni Messiter paints from her studio on Gadigal land (Sydney). She holds an Arts degree from Macquarie University and has a knowledge and deep interest in history and all things horticultural.  

Messiter works are held in the Macquarie University Collection and in private collections both nationally and internationally. She has been represented by Stanley Street Gallery since 2019.

Toni Messiter: CV September, 2024 Download

Denis Clarke: Artist Statement & Bio

Painting for me is a bodily thing. It involves the relationship between one’s self and making contact with the tactile. Why tactile? Because I am touching materials and feeling out my experience of looking at a subject such as landscapes, people and buildings.

Drawing is the whole key. Not drawing for its own sake but drawing to explore ideas for connecting with the world. Finish is irrelevant. These drawings serve the purpose of the painting and illuminate my imagination to the possibilities of new compositions. I am interested in the physicality and directness of drawing which often finds its way into my works on paper as well as my paintings.

My interest is what I would call 'creating a process of informed experiment'. I allow myself to risk and play with media while aligning my senses with the observed. It is the otherness or feel of a subject which provides the impetus to experiment and find new solutions with mark.

For me, working before a subject is deeply complex and a chance to explore visual language. The test is to find graphic statements and abstractions which truthfully parallel perceptions and travel towards a resolved image. Previously Unseen explores my reactions and connection with the urban which has been an important aspect of my painting for many years. It is a reference to my wish to try and see the world anew.

Denis Clarke works across painting and drawing, exploring the relationship between himself, the bodily and the tactile. Interested in creating a process of informed experiment, his paintings extend conversations of subject, texture and paint fluidity that suspend perception and reality. His work layer playful exchanges between drawing and painting processes, finding new solutions with mark-making to explore the subject. Contextualised within the European neo-expressionist movement, Clarke’s colourful gestural works deconstruct improvisation, inviting new and playful languages of representation.  

Clarke completed post-graduate study at St Martins School of Art, London, and received the NSW Travelling Art Scholarship as well as Moya Dyring residency at the Cite International des Arts in Paris. 

Based in Sydney, he has spent periods working and studying in London and Switzerland, teaching at the Camden School of Art and the Hampstead School of Art, exhibiting at Gillian Jason Gallery, Boundary Gallery and James Colman Gallery, Knightsbridge, as well as creating set designs and costumes for the experimental Opera Factory, in Zurich and London. 

Clarke returned to Australia in 1998. 

He has held 17 solo exhibitions since 1975 and has collaborated with several premier arts organisations such as Opera Factory in London and Switzerland, Warwickshire Arts Festival in the UK, and most recently as the artist in residence at Wollombi Valley Arts Council. From 1999 - 2010 Denis was a sessional lecturer at the National Art School and tutor from 2011 ongoing. He also instructs master classes at Charles Sturt University, the University of Southern Queensland, the Mitchell School of Art and the McGregor School.  

Clarke has exhibited in numerous Art Fairs including ‘Line Art, Ghent’, The Brussels Art Fair, The 20th Century British Art Fair, Royal College of Art, and The Islington Art Fair. His work is included in private and public collections including: the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Fitzwilliam College Cambridge and Lloyds of London. 

Clarke has been represented by Stanley Street Gallery since 2014.

Denis Clarke: CV July, 2022 Download

Claire Welch: Artist Statement & Bio

Small Dreams - Exhibition Statement

‘Dawn’ and 'watching it happen', explore the distortion of possible positive directions, which are warped by the anxiety and despair generated by negative media. Both works use monoprinting and reductive mark making techniques to create ambiguous bodily forms.

 

In our current state of uncertainty about our future we experience overwhelming apathy and despair. ‘Dawn’ explores this anxious state, an eruption of dark lines draws the eye to the strained body. The figure is entangled looking out to every horizon for hope.

 

‘watching it happen’ further explores this conflict. Presenting a chrysalis or a shroud, it emerges into life and draws away from it. The diptych exaggerates this conflict by loosely connecting the two halves, leaving a disconnect between them. The figure is caught in time between ambiguity and actuality. The open palmed hands both reaching out but still in a posture of self-protection.

Claire Welch’s printmaking practice revolves around ambiguous and tense bodily forms. Welch is an emerging artist based in Sydney, Australia. She completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the National Art School in 2020 majoring in printmaking. Welch has exhibited in selected group exhibitions, such as 'Rats' at 321 Project Space and 'Luxury Item' at DownUnder space. Welch received the Jocelyn Maughan Sketchbook prize in 2019 and the Bouddi Foundation of the Arts grant in 2016.

"In my practice I examine the body as being in a constant state of becoming; a progressive form. The anxiety I look to is in the slight but important dislocation between body and self. My printmaking practice focuses on this tension through ambiguous bodily forms. The technique of monoprinting is both immediate and unpredictable. This allows for unique textural lines and gestural marks in each print. The process can only produce singular prints rather than reproductions. In this way, my practice mirrors the constant state of change the body and mind undergo".

Claire Welch: CV November, 2022 Download

Andjana Pachkova: Artist Statement & Bio

Andjana Pachkova is captivated by the never-ending dance of nature and the human; passionate and loving to be sure, yet also violent and at times exploitative. Her painting practice is firmly grounded in the intuitive, responding to the invisible and the ephemeral, to landscapes both travelled and felt. Her process follows the flow of substance, finding a place for herself that is liquid, fluid and moving very quickly. Interested in the infinite and treacherous possibility of water and surface, her painting practice explores the mutual interaction of the human and the landscape, how they move to shape and touch each other.

Born in Ukraine, Andjana Pachkova comes from a traditional Russian art tutoring background. Following the political movement Perestroika, she moved to Moscow and took classes at Stroganov Academy of Industrial and Applied Arts.

In 1997 Pachkova won the prestigious Davis Fellowship and subsequently moved to the United States. Alongside her academic studies, Andjana developed a drawing and painting practice informed by a passion for human relationships to landscape, in particular exploring the subtle changes in human psyche that occur when a person moves through a series of places.  Andjana took art courses both at Dartmouth Colledge, New Hampshire and NYU, New York.

Grounded in the intuitive, Andjana’s paintings team with passion, submerging the viewer in an active experience of movement and self- actualisation. Responding to both invisible and ephemeral connection, to topographies both travelled and felt, her practice explores the mutual interaction of human within the landscape, how they move to shape and touch each other. Recently interested in the infinite and treacherous possibility of oceanscapes, her works and painting process have taken on the turbulence of substance, of flowing paint and swirling water, to find a place for herself on canvas that is fluid and living.

Pachkova has studied with notable artists such as Idris Murphy, Jo Bertini, Brandt Lewis, Denis Clarke and Tony Tozer. Upon her move to Australia in 2013, she began to exhibit her work in Sydney and since 2017 has been represented by Stanley Street Gallery in New South Wales.

Andjana's works are held in private collections across the United States, including Harvard Law faculty in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Finland, Israel and Lebanon.

Andjana Pachkova: CV April, 2024 Download

Lucy Chetcuti: Artist Statement & Bio

Phenomena in the natural environment or in a gallery are not altogether self-evident. Their meaning and value are not inherently pre-determined but rather, are dependent on the individuality of the viewer. My work proposes that social “norms”, like heteronormativity, are perpetual and embodied, which influences the sensorial experience of art materials and artworks. My art practice examines the ways in which materials exist within the symbology of the viewer’s understanding of the world which is influenced by heterosexism, capitalism and colonialism. My research applies the theory of queer ecology, to frame my understanding of natural phenomena and objecthood in painting. 

My studio investigations have been led by material experimentation and the development of an abstract language, which includes paintings, objects and installation pieces. By presenting works as “phenomena” and in dialogue with each other, an alternative experience of their spatial reality and inter-relation is inferred. 

I explore the ways that abstraction can be used to queer normative understandings of nature. I emphasise the material state of my works as fragile, precarious, and temporal by incorporating found and natural materials outside of their economic value. My research considers the question, “what makes something queer?” within the realm of abstraction. 

Fragile artworks present themselves from a place of vulnerability and ask for the care they require to exist in the world. Using precarious and impermanent refuse materials critiques the use-value of an artwork and queers an understanding of phenomena in nature. My practice results in a wide array of “anxious objects” without having a secure or clear final form. Many of the works will change over time. My paintings which might be considered a more stable object are made with materials that will change. By presenting art objects in intimate relationships with one another, I propose a queering of natural phenomena. 

Words from 'All Fours' held at Canberra Contemporary Art Space 2023
(A selection of the works are in 'Reprise' 2023 at Stanley Street Gallery)

I use automatic drawing techniques to explore a range of new marks in these recent works. I have also featured monoprinted gestures, shifting between the predictable and the unpredictable. The marks I apply to the ground react within this framework to create a tension between spontaneity and intention, fixed gesture and the innocuous uncontrolled line and ultimately give life to the surface.

Works in this exhibition arise from the compositional prompt of a four section grid. For me, the grid functions as an enabling constraint within the picture plane, which produces more creative possibilities. I consider 'the edge' as a fundamental visual threshold or boundary that can be broached, conversed with, or erased.

The geometric grid is a structure that resonates throughout our everyday environments, memories and worlds. In my search for the exciting feeling of freshness in something mundane, different qualities of line are discovered.

Lucy Chetcuti is an emerging visual artist based on unceded Ngunnawal/Ngambri land, Kamberri / Canberra.

Lucy was a board member of Tributary Projects Artspace between 2019-2021. In 2021 she won the ANU School of Art and Design Drawing Prize. She was a finalist in the 2022 Goulburn Art Award. Her work is held in private collections in Australia. She received First Class in Honours in Painting at the ANU School of Art and Design in 2021. She is a studio resident of Australian National Capital Arts in Kamberri / Canberra.