Heart Of Darkness

Newcastle Herald

Saturday March 22, 2008

JILL STOWELL

Among the constellation of exhibitions at the Newcastle Region Art Gallery is a discrete bay of tiny works by Nicola Hensel. Best known to us for recent forceful drawings of life-sized plants and flowers, she enjoys surprising us with radical shifts in scale, as her tiny drawings of large trees made evident last year at JMG.

Nocturne is an attempt to capture the mysterious power of the hours of darkness on a series of miniature ink-blue blocks.

Little white drawings of the sleeping city with its houses and gardens compel us to look closely. Perhaps the message is, at least in part, that we usually take this daily event completely for granted. But night has its magic.

This compulsively strange work is on view until April 13, with Nicola Hensel conducting a workshop for drawing in Civic Park on Saturday April 12. Bookings on 4974 5112.

The NRAG is preparing to celebrate the legacy of its most generous patron, William Bowmore, who died late last year. There may well be some surprises in the planned assemblage of paintings, sculpture, ceramics and works on paper, all evidence of an extraordinarily wide-ranging taste and enthusiasm.

At Podspace, photographs by Deborah Hally and Clare Weeks promise some innovative images by two award-winning artists. Clare Weeks has long found allegory in meditative studies of a blind-covered window lighting an abandoned room. A shadowy inhabitant underlines the inherent sense of transcendence.

Deborah Hally deals with a cognate sense of loss in many teasing images. The fingers of gloves are knotted together, toys are outgrown, painted fingernails represent the past and the present.

This distinguished exhibition is on view until March 29.

The current exhibitors at the Front Room Gallery are either advanced students or recent graduates. This is an excellent plan. It introduces newly enrolled students at the start of the academic year to the degree of visual sophistication their course can stimulate. It also constitutes for the artists a marker point in an ongoing work in progress.

The overarching theme for this thoughtful exhibition is the life of the imagination, both in memories and in dreams.

Amanda Oakes makes passages of text funny, deadpan and surreal an intrinsic element of her dream narratives.

Emily Roberts questions the links between memory and identity. A row of mousetraps ensnares instant thoughts, mind-grabs of intuition. A flight of glass spheres poignantly demonstrates the present becoming the past.

Michael Randall's starting point is the family, his own memories and the inevitable way in which the recollection of dead loved ones fades with time.

It is a pity this fine show closes on March 21.

I'm sorry to have missed the previous exhibition where Emily Mitchell, Antonia Gore and Robyn McPherson explored their lives and times in Girls by Girls.

At Wattspace until March 30 are the usual multiple exhibitions.

Naomi Gow's works on paper and board reflect the brilliant colours and patterns of an intense experience of Africa.

Dermod Kavanagh photographs the shadows and shrouded memories in an old house.

For photographer Michelle Stewart, high-heeled shoes develop a life of their own.

Sarah Berlot embeds her female nude in symphonic colour.

In the Loading Dock is a diversity of artworks from various hands.

There are a large number of exhibitions opening, with Easter deadlines meaning I have yet to see all the work.

Sandy Gray's paintings with photographs, postcards and diary excerpts, at the Paynter Gallery until March 30, are based on travels on both sides of the Mediterranean. She responds with an informed eye to architecture and the details of interesting buildings. A new lyricism may well pervade her work.

At the University Gallery, landscape is the theme for eight postgraduate painters, many of them well known. It will be good to see the atmospheric surfaces of Anne Marie Murland and the transfiguration of the real world in work by Una Rey, Colin Lawson and John Barnes.

Andy Devine is undeterred by big subjects. Mark Eliot Rankin is familiar to me as an abstractionist. Emily Reuter and Aaron Bellette will provide surprise.

Also to be seen is a postgraduate exhibition, with photographs of exotic places by Jacqueline Morgan.

At the Catbird Gallery in Dungog through March are textile and mixed-media works. Fiona Wright is, I think, an artist using felt to recreate memories and impressions of places visited while travelling.

Jane Richens looks no further than the familiar forest for sculpture pieces in felt based on leaves, fungi and fruits. These are also the inspiration for jewellery.

CHOICE VIEWING

Newcastle Region Art Gallery

Until April 13: Everlasting: The Garden in the Newcastle Region Art Gallery Collection,

Whiteleys Garden

Until May 19: The Blacksmith Shop: Paintings by Robert Barnes

Cooks Hill Galleries

Until March 23: Ken Strong, Rhondda Walters, Col Henry