Seeing Place
A Solo Exhibition by Winsome Spiller
1 Aug – 22 Aug
Opening Reception: Saturday 1 August, 2 – 4pm
Gallery 1
Seeing Place brings together a body of work exploring the many ways a place can be experienced, remembered and reimagined through art. Drawing from imagined landscapes, personal memory and documented environments, the exhibition reflects Winsome’s ongoing investigation into how places shape our emotional and visual understanding of the world around us.
Working across painting, collage, plaster, cardboard and sand, Winsome moves fluidly between abstraction and representation, allowing each work to respond intuitively to the character and atmosphere of a place. Some works emerge from direct observation, while others are reconstructed through memory, fragments of maps and sensory impressions that blur the boundaries between geography and imagination.
“These works stem from my interest in places – whether particular places I have remembered or photographed; my home city imagined from historic maps; or places that are imaginary – suggested to me by the forms of my process-based abstract works. I have evoked these places in various ways: representation via photograph or painting; incorporating site materials (like dust or rock) into the artwork; using more gestural painting referencing maps; and through making abstract forms and marks that suggest a type of place or type of landscape.
Although this is what I had in mind when making these works, I am very happy for viewers to interpret them in any way they like.
My past work as a town planner at a time when interpreting places via maps was essential, and my interests in urban history and natural systems, have influenced the way I “see” or represent places – often from a wide, and aerial viewpoint, and sometimes imagining what places may have been like in the past.”