Image: Natalie Lavelle, Untitled (Ochre, Iron Oxide and Gold), 2023, acrylic on Italian linen, 220cm x 95cm x 20cm. Photo by Louis Lim; Pippa Makgill, installation detail at Studio 26 ‘artist in session’, 2023, photo by Pippa Makgill. Images courtesy of the artists.
About Nothing brings together the practices of Natalie Lavelle and Pippa Makgill. In this exhibition, Natalie’s assertive and vast canvases alongside Pippa’s precarious structures attempt to represent the formless or the presence of ‘nothing’. Sitting on this threshold of almost nothing offers grounds of possibilities and prompts a kind of self-awareness in the here and now.
The emphasis on movement in their works through gestural applications and spatial considerations direct attention to the artist’s bodies in making the work. The viewer’s navigation of the works is also carefully observed. Here Natalie and Pippa’s works underline touch, motility, and change, infusing a matter-of-fact vocabulary with a richness and persistence of human sensuality and impulsiveness.
In following the sense of bodies and underscoring the idea of ‘nothing’, About Nothing contemplates the depths and complexities of reason and meaning. The works accentuate the need to explain or describe in order to assign logic and understanding. Instead, Natalie and Pippa’s works encourage uncertainty, challenge expectations and leave space for interpretation.
ARTIST TALK + OFFICIAL OPENING EVENT
Saturday 10 August 3-6pm
Join us at 3pm to hear from artists Natalie Lavelle and Pippa Makgill in-conversation with co-director Sharna Barker. The official opening event will follow from 4-6pm.
GALLERY HOURS
Friday 9 August 10-2pm
Saturday 10 August 11-3pm
Sunday 11 August 10-12pm
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
NATALIE LAVELLE
Natalie Lavell is a Meanjin/Brisbane based artist working across abstract painting fields of minimalism, abstract expressionism, and colour field painting. Her practice questions historical understandings and interpretations of art by promoting a leaning-in to the immediate, sensuous experience of the work. In their object-ness and through gestural formalist negotiations, these paintings often consider their likeness to the human body and bodily identities.
Lavelle has a Bachelor of Fine Art Honours (Class 1) from Queensland Collage of Art (QCA) where she was the recipient of the Zonta Club Brisbane River Acquisitive Prize (2018). Her work has been exhibited at Jan Manton Gallery (Qld), Outer Space Contemporary Art Organisation (Qld), Queensland Collage of Art Galleries (Qld), Campbelltown Arts Centre (NSW), Stable Artspace (Qld), Saint Cloche (NSW), Five Walls (VIC), Galeria Azur (Berlin, GER), Byron School of Art (NSW) and Royal Queensland Art Society where she was awarded the Abstraction Art Prize by judge, Andrew Baker. Natalie’s work is in the collections of Artbank (Sydney), Queensland Children’s Hospital, The Justin Art House Museum (Melbourne) and various Corporate and Private Collections. Natalie is represented by Jan Manton Gallery (Brisbane, Qld).
@nat.lavelle | http://www.natlavelle.com | https://www.facebook.com/NatalieLavelle
PIPPA MAKGILL
Pippa Makgill (New Zealand b.1982) is an Australian based artist with a practice that spans painting and sculpture. She graduated with a Bachelor in Fine Arts in Painting from Elam School of Fine Arts, New Zealand in 2004 and completed a Master of Fine Arts through Monash University, Melbourne, Australia in 2011.
Her work addresses the idea of shifting materiality and the presence of the 'formless' in space. She often apply's the concept of 'fluidity' to her work which captures the idea of gesture within static mediums. Within her work there is an extended consideration to the materiality of subjects and the immersive space that encounter brings. She is compelled by 'edges' and how they can pull on the body's sensual guage of sight, surface and form.
@pippamakgill | www.pippamakgill.com
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This project is part of our 2024 INSITE Destabilise Program and is supported through the Creative Industries Investment Program and is jointly funded by Sunshine Coast Council’s Arts and Heritage Levy and the Regional Arts Development Fund in partnership with the Queensland Government.