From Rebecca Gallo…
As mother and daughter working in the same, at times insular field, Ann Cape and Sophie Cape have forged independent and successful careers. For An Unending Shadow at Mosman Art Gallery, they have collaborated for the first time, coming together to explore the nature and impact of dementia.
The subject is a highly personal one. Both artists draw on first-hand experience in caring for a sufferer of dementia, as well as looking to engage more broadly with the impacts of this illness on society. Where Ann favours the figurative and the subtle, Sophie’s works are bombastic, large-scale and abstract. Ann met with and created portraits of sufferers and carers, seeking clues to their experiences in their faces and hands. Sophie’s process is visceral and physical: she uses her body and incidental elements of the landscape to produce dark, expressionistic works that seek to communicate that which sufferer is no longer able to. Ann and Sophie collaborated on a single painting, and the strength of both artists’ vision is evident in the density of layers and the push-and-pull of abstract and representational.
An Unending Shadow provides a thoughtful and powerful visual representations of the impact of an illness whose shadow is cast long over those who have witnessed or experienced its painful progress.
Until November 29
Mosman Art Gallery, Mosman
Pic: Ann Cape and Sophie Cape, Echoes through a thousand labyrinths flown, 2015, Oil, acrylic, ink, pigment, charcoal, graphite, pastel and salt on canvas, 188 x 232 cm. Image copyright the artists and courtesy Mosman Art Gallery.
