Whanganui artist Sue Cooke faced some challenges in sending her work for exhibition in Melbourne.
Photo / Bevan Conley
Whanganui artist Sue Cooke faced some challenges in sending her work for exhibition in Melbourne.
Photo / Bevan Conley
Whanganui artist Sue Cooke planned to be in the fashionable arts area of Fitzroy in Melbourne, Australia this month.
While Cooke couldn't get there, her exhibition Silva Inferno is showing at the PG Gallery in Brunswick St and Melburnians who are now out of lockdown can view the Whanganui artist'swork, which made it across the Tasman after some nail-biting setbacks.
"It felt very strange to be in Whanganui on opening day with the work in Melbourne," Cooke said.
"However for the exhibition to have opened at all is a grand success with the world in such turmoil."
Cooke said Silva Inferno is an exhibition inspired by the glow and the power of fire and its role in deforestation.
"The exhibition depicts the beauty, tragedy, and regeneration of a forest during and after the burn."
Planning for the exhibition began in late 2019 when Cooke submitted an exhibition proposal to PG Gallery. The proposal was accepted and a date was confirmed for June 2020.
In preparation for exhibiting in Australia Cooke had taken a drawing trip, in May 2019, into far north Western Australia sourcing ideas and making many drawings and watercolours in both the Kimberley and Pilbara regions.
"It was a continued exploration of ideas around my ongoing series of deforestation and I was also wanting to focus on the desert as a subject," said Cooke.
"To depict the desert has been an ambition of mine since childhood."
Cooke spent her first 12 years growing up in Sydney and while the Blue Mountains was the furthest inland she travelled, the concept and images of the desert were prevalent in advertising, novels, paintings, and yarns of inland travels by extended family and friends.
"Whilst in the Pilbara region, I visited the Millstream Chichester National Park, the ancestral land of the Yindjibarndi people.
"The area is renowned for its water lilies but the timing of the visit was just after a controlled burn, so the ash was hot and the timber was still smoking. The aim of the controlled burn was to eliminate introduced palms and allow space for the indigenous palms of the area to thrive. However, the blackened landscape covered in silver ash and gold scorched fronds was a visual theatre perfectly fitting to the issues around deforestation by fire."
Silva - Snappy Gum. Lithograph and gouache by Sue Cooke.
Photo / Supplied
The scenes inspired a series of lithographs and pastels on black paper begun in Australia and completed over the first level 4 lockdown in New Zealand.
"A delay in sourcing framing materials once lockdown finished, uncertain logistics regarding freight, and the uncertainty of Melbourne's lockdowns meant a decision was reluctantly made by myself and the gallery to postpone the exhibition," said Cooke.
However, PG Gallery directors Fi James, and Irene Torres successfully applied for a grant to put Silva Inferno and two other postponed exhibitions online. Cooke was able to supply footage filmed by her son Matt Smith in her Whanganui studio.
"The finished online exhibition was a very polished production," said Cooke.
A new date was set for the physical exhibition in Melbourne but Cooke discovered that it would cost $3500 to send her framed works there and it would be too risky to send the delicate lithographs with chalk pastel unframed.
She reworked her 2020 versions of the exhibition using stone lithography combined with the more robust medium of gouache.
"It was a very nervous wait after sending the works unframed via NZ Post as to when they would arrive as no promises were made," she said.
"One work was sold on opening day to a buyer from Christchurch who saw the works online."
Whanganui audiences can take a virtual tour of Silva Inferno by visiting pggallery.com.au
