Artist Statement

Jo Davidson’s recent paintings address the psychic unrest of our times. The Solastalgia tondos painted in acrylic on wood panel offcuts, offer portholes into places of solace from prevailing grief, positive portals to review and adapt to a shapeshifting world. The Weight of Light series on canvas attempt to see further into bigger stories, powerful shifts and balances, monumental hypocrisies, cause and effects on a world we tilt to the edge of our control, like treading on the tail of the tiger, asking  ‘What are we without the living world in all its intricate majesty?’

Artist Bio

Jo Davidson has been practicing art since well before her first solo show at Ray Hughes Gallery in Brisbane in the late 70s.  As a teenager Jo was tutored for 5 years by renowned South Australian artist Ruth Tuck, and studied at the SA School of Art through the mid 70s.  After residencies in Adelaide and Dalby Qld, Jo and artist partner Stephen Killick travelled extensively throughout Europe, for 3 years in the early eighties. They visited galleries, biennales, museums, collections public & private and carried out residencies in London, southern France, Amsterdam, and Venice Italy, and in the late 90s in Noosa and Gloucester.

They have lived and worked at their property Outer Magnolia, in Birdwood NSW midnorth coast hinterland, since 1986, establishing an artist in residence there in 2023.   Both their children Jasper(@Toggles sculptor/stage designer) and Nixi(@nixikillick artist/fashion designer) were raised in Birdwood and with their parents, participated in creating local performing arts and circus festival projects throughout their childhood.

Jo Davidson works in painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, sound, installation, poetry and CACD, and is an activist for environmental protection, climate change, and social justice.    She has held 18 solo shows and been in over 35 group exhibitions. Her work can be found in state, public and private collections around Australia and overseas.

From 2004 to 2019 Jo worked with CACD organization Beyond Empathy as lead artist and project coordinator on their maternal health engagement strategy - Mubali Sea of Bellies. She trained and employed local First Nations artists and Health Workers in the art of belly casting and translated the project from Moree throughout NSW communities and into SEQ and WA. In 2018 for NAIDOC Because of Her We Can, Jo curated and staged exhibitions of beautiful Indigenous painted pregnant belly casts in Brisbane, Lismore, Forster, Sydney, Melbourne and Moree.

Jo was a TAFE Art teacher for 14 years, on Fine Arts and Aboriginal Arts programs, and has held many arts workshops in festivals, regional galleries and schools around her region.     She painted a number of significant murals locally and worked with community and disabled artists on various public art projects in midnorth coast NSW, being involved in steering and creating a local sculpture festival for Port Macquarie through early 2000s.   

Now retired to their own studio practices, garden, beautiful country and grandchildren, Jo and Stephen also enjoy sharing the company and inspiration of other artists working at the cabin/studio residence they built together several years ago   @outermagnoliastudio.

Artist Statement

Wendy Jagger, a regional artist from North East Victoria, is renowned for her ceramics and paintings. Her work originates in the field, where she paints en plein air, capturing the raw beauty and ephemeral qualities of the natural world. The essence of the diverse environments she experiences is rendered with a sensitivity and clarity that invites viewers to witness the landscapes through her eyes.

Artist Bio

Surrounded by the beautiful alpine environment of Victoria’s North East, Wendy Jagger’s studio looks directly to Mt Buller. Her renowned paintings and ceramics are strongly influenced by seasonal changes in the landscape and the diversity of native Australian flora.

Wendy's work begins in the field, painting en plein air, capturing the natural world's raw beauty and ephemeral qualities. Her sketches are developed in the studio in various painting media and clay into larger, more considered compositions, using oil and acrylic paints, and thrown vessels which become her canvas.

Her awarded work is held in private and public collections, including Bendigo Art Gallery, Manningham Gallery, and Holmesglen TAFE Collection. She has completed commissioned pieces for clients such as the National Gallery of Victoria, the Victorian State Parliament, Mazda Australia, the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation, and Mt Buller RMB.

Wendy has over 30 years’ experience in art education, from primary to tertiary levels. She now teaches weekly classes and workshops in her Mansfield studio, sharing her acquired knowledge and skills. She opens her studio annually to the public on the Melbourne Cup weekend and is the founder of the successful Mansfield Open Studio Trail, fondly known as most.

Through her artist abstractions, Crystal Wu explores one of the more complex and elusive human emotions, the sensation known as love. Wishing to communicate more than a general impression of love, however, she is interested in dissecting the specific aspects and varieties of that changeable feeling. For instance, the portrayal of love’s courage, as exemplified in the works of the Russian French artist Marc Chagall, is one such point of inspiration. In contrast, the comforting aspect of familial intimacy as seen in Paul Gaugin’s painting ‘The Two Sisters’ provides another point of departure. Wu is a keen traveller, and many of her works are inspired and based on places that she has been to. She also believes that this is a love for nature from her memory. Ultimately, Wu strives to create a warmth of feeling in her paintings, a mood that is easily connected to love in all its dimensions.

Crystal Wu was born in Shanghai, China and moved to Melbourne in 2018, she worked in fashion production for more than 20 years, and has her own business in Shanghai. Since moving to Melbourne, Wu has devoted a lot of time to art and paintings. There is a warmth of feeling in her works, one moreover that is easily connected to love in all its dimensions, she said “I feel countless moments of love and being loved in my life, and these intangible feelings turn into a force that drives me to use colours and brushes to express myself freely”. In 2023, her two works both named “Untitled” were selected for exhibition at TWHA WHIF in Los Angeles. Then in 2024, her work “Exit” was again selected for a showcase at ANKHART in Paris. She had her solo painting exhibition in December 2024 at the ACAE gallery. 

The artworks John Renkin has selected for this exhibition feature landscapes from South Australia and Victoria. They are views of clusters of scattered trees in fields of open grassland often on a rise. He was drawn to these landscapes as they offered potential for compositions that could be explored from different views, at different times of the day and during different seasons throughout the year. These compositions explore the ways in which colour, tone, and structure create balance and contrast. Features like trees appear simplified but with enough variation to add movement and breakup masses. All artworks have been produced using oil paint on wood panels. They have been completed in a single session, observing directly from life on location. This method enables Renkin to capture the immediacy of his response to the landscape.

Renkin has been drawing and painting from an early age. He pursued an art education as an adult at various CAE drawing classes and studied still life, figure, and landscape painting with David Moore. Renkin enjoys spending time outside in the natural environment. He has spent time travelling throughout regional Australia and has had various painting excursions in the Northern Territory, South Australia, New South Wales, Victoria, and Tasmania. Renkin has been involved with numerous group and solo exhibitions and has been a finalist in self portrait and landscape exhibitions at the Castlemaine Art Museum.

Architecture, like many disciplines shaped by Enlightenment rationality, operates within rigid binary oppositions—up and down, interior and exterior, solid and void. These self-referential constructs limit architecture’s ability to fully engage with complex spatial interdependencies. Bound by conventional representation methods like planes, sections, and elevations, architecture struggles to address the fluid, polyvalent nature of contemporary space.

Painting, as a two-dimensional medium, has long pursued spatial depth, while architecture, paradoxically, reduces its own spatiality to lines on paper. By merging the two fields, a new mode of architectural expression emerges—one that is sentimental, ambiguous, and immersive. This series of paintings serves as an alternative architectural medium, existing simultaneously as architectural drawings and tangible, emotive objects. They oscillate between space and representation, challenging architecture’s rigid dualities by embracing idiosyncrasy, atmosphere, and spatial interference.

Evan Cooper's current exhibition focuses on multiple-exposure photography. He also tries to find ways to present the work differently to standard printed photography. His "Echoes and Whispers" exhibition was exhibited after being printed on georgette so that it was sheer and able to move with the air currents of the room. The images were also printed 1.4 x 1.8 metres in size so that the images could fill a large portion of a person's vision. His "Smile" exhibition was printed on velvet, inviting a sensory experience with the artwork. While he uses digital photography in these multiple exposure works, he also explores analogue processes such as printing and hand-colouring.  Cooper likes to use older techniques to introduce them in a contemporary context.

“Cafuné” is a word of Brazilian Portuguese origin, meaning to gently run your fingers through someone's hair. While society has lost many of the restrictive views of sex between consenting adults, sometimes we have lost the ability to find simple affection between people we care about. Physical contact has been shown to have healing qualities. In hospitals there are programs called "cuddle mums", where people (they don't have to be women)  hold or cuddle premature babies, if their own family are unable to. Human contact can help a newborn thrive in a way that simple medical intervention and care cannot. 

In most cities there are clubs or locations that can easily facilitate sexual activity, but the same cannot be said for finding a person to give you a hug when you need it.  There are apps where you can connect with someone to have a casual encounter, but none exist that help you to connect with a person to snuggle on the couch, eating popcorn and binge watching. These works explore the healing power of affection and the importance of physical contact with no hidden agenda - other than to let people know that they are important just as they are.

Evan Cooper was introduced to photography in high school in the 80s. He was planning on making it a career, but after a family medical emergency changed his path it became a hobby.  And in many ways he is glad that it did. His photography projects are solely about what he wants to explore and present to the world. It is also a way of blocking out the stresses of modern life and focuses on something creative.

Join us for Linda Marie artist talk at Red Gallery, 24 May at 1pm.

Working across painting, drawing and installation, Linda (Naarm/Melbourne) traces the emotional rhythms of landscape both vast and internal.

Somatic interiors began with the idea that the human body responds to and holds lived experience in a very different way to the conscious mind. Accessing that knowledge creates an avenue for alternative expression and the opportunity to establish a deeper connection with the viewer.

Linda Marie (Naarm/Melbourne) works across painting, drawing and installation. Her art practice reflects her longstanding interest in the physical and emotional experience of being in big landscapes above and below the water, and the inevitable disconnect that arises when attempting to communicate sensory experience to another. She has exhibited in solo and group shows since 2017.

Linda Marie @linda.marie.art