Kate Dorrough – ‘Asian Art News #29’

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Art exhibition catalogue for Kate Dorrough

The Lyrical River

KATE DORROUGH
Manning Regional Art Gallery, NSW, Australia.
25 July-September 1, 2019

“The river has great wisdom and whispers its secrets to the hearts of men.”

– Mark Twain

The fertile life of rivers and streams has always stirred the human imagination. Throughout western history, poets from Coleridge and Tennyson to Emily Dickinson have waxed lyrical about the force of a river flowing out to the sea, or the quietude of a gentle brook or trickling stream.  Late last century Australian painter Arthur Boyd based most of his final series of paintings around his beloved Shoalhaven River. For nearly a decade, contemporary Sydney artist Kate Dorrough has inherited this fascination with the landscape of Australian inland rivers.

With childhood memories of swimming in the deep river waters of the Wollomombi brook (in northern NSW) embedded in her psyche, Dorrough has long been drawn to the symbolic quality of rivers as a powerful source of life.

The river landscape has also provided Dorrough with the opportunity to expand her art practice. Since the 1980s she has primarily been known as a figurative painter, but in recent years Dorrough has increasingly diversified her work, creating more simplified abstract landscapes, as well as turning her talents to hand-crafted ceramic vessels and objects, that resemble essentialised organic forms.

In 2011 she spent a month in Mildura, Victoria, capturing the changing moods of the Murray river, which formed the basis of her series ‘The Enduring Landscape’ at Catherine Asquith Gallery in Melbourne (2011), followed by a solo show at Arthouse Gallery in Sydney (‘The Enduring Landscape and the Inland River’, 2012).

For this exhibition at Manning Regional Art Gallery, Dorrough has expanded her ambitions to create a mixed media theatrical presentation of river life, specific to the Manning River environment of the northern tablelands.  To create this multi-faceted interpretation of the river, she has incorporated abstract paintings, rustic ceramic and concrete sculptures, video projections and fabric hangings, to build up a multi sensory experience of the river environment.  The common link between all these forms is a rich materiality that evokes a visceral experience of the environment for the viewer.

This series has developed over several field trips to the Manning River region; undertaking plein air sketching, which was further, developed and expanded back in her Sydney studio.  She was inspired by the diversity of the area, with its inlets, deltas, tidal flats, lagoons and islands.  The artist explored the Harrington and Saltwater National Park, where the river meets the sea and observed the abundant fish and bird life of the Cattai wetlands.

Employing acrylic paint on linen, her layered paintings possess a rough hewn texture that suggests hidden depths, with calligraphic lines floating on the surface like some kind of primeval markings on the land; this is echoed in the tactile surfaces of her ceramic vessels.

Wandering from room to room through the exhibition is akin to meandering along a winding riverbank – the large scale acrylic paintings are stained with deep pigments – sea green, turquoise, golden yellows, salmon pinks and deep amber.  Concrete rocks tinted salmon pink and ochre are embedded with oyster shells and ceramic fragments, like historic fossils from the rivers depths.  Scattered among these works are water birds coarsely assembled from branches found along the river bank, as well as loosely constructed emblems of river fauna and sources of human industry- fish and dairy cows, oysters and fishing boats which sit on rough concrete plinths. In exploring the river’s long history, Dorrough’s materials and forms reference the farming of the Manning region, as well as the timber industry that thrived by the river. Underlying all of this commercial history, she acknowledges the long history of the Biripi people upon this land.

Sounds of rushing water fill the exhibition rooms, alongside a video footage of the flowing river itself.  The mystical aspects of the river are addressed by a series of ceramic water ‘sprites’, simplified bleached forms with human like features. They symbolically act like ancient spiritual totems of the river and perhaps allude to its hidden indigenous presence.

Dorrough’s gestural works also reference the elemental forces of the river, as a source of fertility and life, with its constant movement and elemental cycles of creation and erosion, renewal and destruction. According to the artist, her abstract markings suggest a kind of primal language of the land.  It is only through some form of communion or connection with this environment that we can decipher and interpret its meaning.

All the pieces on display work together to create a multilayered, multifaceted but unified exhibition. Through this immersive visual experience, Dorrough aims to alter the viewer’s perception towards an almost animistic understanding of river life; in order to appreciate the uniqueness of this complex yet fragile ecosystem, which needs our protection.  The artist ends her exhibition by opening the river experience up to the community, by inviting the viewers to write about their own subjective experience or memories of the Manning River.

It is an interesting personal fact that it was over the past decade of Kate Dorrough’s river explorations that the artist gave birth to her two sons.  This richly poetic and earthy exhibition is indeed a celebration of life itself.

Sydney Art writer and editor, Victoria Hynes
Artice in Asian Art News
Kate Dorrough at the Manning Regional Art Gallery review in Asian Art News by arts writer and editor Victoria Hynes

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