From Carrie Miller...
In 2012 Louisa Chircop was selected as a finalist for the prestigious Dobell Prize – an award for excellence in drawing. And with Chircop’s diverse practice which ranges across subject matter, medium, and style, it is her facility for draughtsmanship that unites her pictures.
The artist mines her subconscious imaginary for inspiration. To make it concrete, she sifts through magazines, books, and old photos for images that she finds particular emotional and psychological connections with. These may become subject matter for a painting or the material for mixed media work which incorporate elements of photomontage.
Chircop’s paintings are constructed with a moody, almost melancholic, palette, in keeping with the artist’s exploration of existential themes. Her invented landscapes reflect the shifting and slippery nature of the subconscious and elicit mixed existential emotions such as angst, guilt, hope, freedom, hopelessness and despair.
Chircop is obsessively fascinated by her own changing and conflicted feelings about life and how these feelings can be expressed and transformed through art. This is reflected in her images whose meanings are always elusive; the viewer is required to reflect on their own feelings in order to make sense of the artist’s intimate psychological renderings which nevertheless reveal something of common human experience.
Until March 23
A-M Gallery, Newtown
Pic: Louisa Chircop, Crossing, 2012. Oil on canvas, 76 x 107cm. Courtesy of the artist and A-M Gallery.
