Barbara Dawson, Configuration, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist.
Barbara Dawson
Gallery 3
Friday 22 March - Sunday 14 April
Opening Thursday 21 March 2024, 6pm - 8pm
The landscape, sea, coast, and open spaces can be powerful, emotive places of exploration, reminiscence and memories. Barbara Dawson’s ‘Layered Land’ series of drawings and textiles investigates the way a place is remembered. In the mind’s reinterpreting details are altered, omitted, and become imbued with one’s own emotional outlook.
Barbara Dawson’s practice as an artist is activated by her connection to place, to the environment, and to natural processes evident with the passage of time. Barbara’s intention is not to represent the landscape, rather it is to capture and communicate her lived experience of being in it. These are contemplative works emerging through slow processes over extended periods of time.
Dawson favours a limited colour palette in her artwork exploring tonal changes which, for her, embrace the concept of time and timelessness. Through combining and layering different procedures - reclaiming and repurposing materials, drawing, layering, dyeing, stitching, - she is able to capture and communicate her relationship and concern for landscape. And remind us we are not separate from it but are inextricably part of it.
About the Artist
Barbara Dawson’s art explores her relationship to the landscape and environment she inhabits. She favours using subdued effects of layers, tonal colour and texture to evoke personal memories and stories of place and belonging.
Dawson’s mediums and processes encompass: botanical dyes, natural colorants, charcoal, rust and ochres; plant contact prints and collography; drawing, painting and stitching.
As a mature-age student Dawson gained her visual arts degree through ANU School of Art, then went on to complete a Graduate Diploma and Master of Education. She spent twenty years in Canberra schools teaching visual art, media studies and photo media. Dawson has been consistently exhibiting her work in solo and group exhibitions since 1998. She has been living and creating in Jervis Bay since 1994 and is an active member of the area’s arts community.
