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31 January - 17 February Join us for the exhibition opening Saturday 1 February at 2pm Why are the most experienced in society often the most overlooked? In a culture that values youth, fashion and social norms, we are bucking the trend and showcasing the work of 20 incredible female artists over 60 years old. The fact that we received dozens of applications from around the country only illustrates how invisible older women are, and the dire need for exhibitions like this. Join us to see, touch and hear these women’s stories, learn from their experience, and celebrate their incredible creative talent. Works include painting, illustration, collage, textiles and sculpture. This is destined to be our most popular exhibition yet – don’t miss it! FEATURING: Sandra Burns Elaine Foulsham Lynn Godfree Pleasance Ingle Mandy McAlister Lloma McKenzie Barbara McLennan Helen Mountford Janet Reinhardt Audrey Rhoda Bronwyn Rodden Marian Shapiro Elizabeth Smith Catherine Tait Gerlinde Thomas Jenny Trezise Cecily Waters Barbara Wheeler 
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13 - 27 January Join us for the exhibition opening Friday 17 January at 5:30pm In their latest exhibition, Blue Mountains artists Emma Rowan-Kelly, Bonnie McArthur and Sophie Miller synthesise and explore their collective vision of the Inner State. Together, they address multiple concepts such as; how our perspectives can influence our conscious reality, how an empathetic understanding of our shared sentience can be provoked and the diversity of these states within inspirational women.   Yed & Rellow by Faye Wilson 12 - 31 December Join us for the exhibition opening Saturday 14 December at 2pm In March 2019, Faye made a pilgrimage to Huangshan (Yellow Mountain) in Anhui Provence , Eastern China where her fascination with symbol, the colour combination red & yellow and walking poetry ignited into this series of new works. With exhibition names names such as “Three Foxes & a Yellow Arrow (1998 ) Snow on a Black Dog’s Back ( 2001), Black & Blue ( 2014) , Black White & Red Allover ( 2017) and now Yed & Rellow, Faye’s synaesthesic response to colour and to letters and symbol is at the heart of her creative work. Faye has been combining poetry and visual imagery since childhood - often making hand made books or designing and printing them into more traditional forms. In a number of these works, she experiments with code. By replacing letters with less easily accessible code - the process of reading the poems or message is confounded so that ( she hopes) the viewer experiences each symbol, word and the whole poem in a very different way to the way one would read it in familiar language. Faye ideates poetry when walking and the tradition of writing and walking is ingrained in Chinese literature. Without trying to emulate the traditional 5/7/5 structure of Haiku, her walking poems are often short and quite close to this. “When walking on my own, word images come to me highly condensed and pure like little diamonds from a jumbled intake of sound, sight, smell, touch. I carry these in my memory and sometimes write them down later.”  Jazz by Faye Wilson The visual poems in this exhibition are a further attempt to marry complex synaesthesic responses in a way that for Faye, purely text or purely image does not.
“My early works in calligraphic brush and ink have had a lasting influence on my thinking and art practice. Chinese writing intrigues me. When hand formed with an instrument as finely tuned as a Chinese brush in the hands of an artist, the ideograms are charged with breathtaking energy and nuance. When I was in China recently I was very aware of the impact of the Chinese characters that were all around me and how different it was to look at these without knowing the meanings, I started to create my own symbols and then developed the experimental code used to make some of these works. When researching codes later, I discovered Nüshu - the womens’ script and was intrigued to learn that this secret language was developed exclusively by women for women in Jiangyong County in Hunan province of southern China sometime after 900. Over the years the combination of Red & Yellow has cropped up in my work with regularity. In China the signs are often written in this primal and highly charged mix and combined with my fascination for the symbols themselves - I found myself very focused on them. I collect sentences and strings of words like beads and carry them in my head. I made the series of “Strange Loops” necklaces as homage to this process and named them after one of my favourite word strings the title of a book “I am a Strange Loop” by Douglas Hofstadter. Other homages to word strings that I love crop up in the work too; “The Psychoanalysis of Fire” the title of a book by Gaston Bachelard. There is one made up from of a sentence from Samuel Beckett’s 1938 novel “Murphy”, that I have carried around in my head since I read it 20 years ago. Yellow is one of my favourite words and the combination of the words Yellow & Red is a little poem in itself to me.”  5 – 9 December 2019
Exhibition opening 6 December For Katya Petetskaya it is important to approach her paintings without a preconceived idea, just with an urge to make a mark. “This is my search into new (to me) forms of knowledge via the painting medium. I use traditional materials as a painting and support base to stay within the painting language but I do not approach them as ‘known’ to me through my previous experiences or learnt techniques. I attempt to re-establish qualities of these materials as they are, on their own terms, outside of my expectations. I wait for propositions from the materials and I respond. The image appears but I delay its ‘interpretation’ in order to give a chance to newer forms to emerge that are not immediately known or familiar to me.” Paintings are built on repetition of a limited number of brush mark movements, carefully researched through exercises using performance art techniques. Mountain mist has inspired Petetskaya to further explore the boundaries between the figurative and abstract. ‘In Other Places’ explores the artist’s personal space which inhabits not only physical locations but also mentally constructed places. Elements from time spent in Russia, remote areas of Australia, the Blue Mountains and Panama, appear alongside subterranean worlds, prehistoric landscapes, utopias, extra-terrestrial civilisations and the like. Come and explore the connections that emerge from this body of work. Join us for the opening celebration of ‘In Other Places’ in the main gallery at Platform Gallery at 5.30pm on Friday 6 December 2019. And again for a tea ceremony at 3pm on Saturday 7 December. After her recent visit to Malta, Pleasance produced a series of gouache and ink urban landscapes that explore life beyond the postcard-perfect seas and skies. Her gentle hand and soft palette juxtapose the gritty chaos she experienced there, and shows a side of the tourist paradise that outsiders rarely get to see. Below are works from the exhibition, which come framed. Please contact the gallery on kelly@platformgallery.co or 02 4742 0047 for sales enquiries.  14– 27 November 2019 Join us for the exhibition opening on Friday 15 November. Traditional quilt patterns such as Broken Dishes are a recurring theme in Pippita Bennet’s work, as is the Wagga Blanket tradition – remnant and reused pieces of fabric, food bags and clothing stitched together, to provide warmth, comfort and beauty. In juxtaposition to this are Aboriginal possum skin blankets, painstakingly created, highly treasured and also warm and comforting. Bennett creates landscapes of cloth and paper to explore relationships between people and place; in particular her own connection with place. “I am certain we carry an imprint of the journeys of our ancestors within our being; their struggles and their joys. While I don’t believe these define who we are, I do believe they leave a ‘watermark’ in our unconscious memory. My research and my art practice is an attempt to build my understanding of who I am in my landscape by bringing this memory into consciousness.”  Bennett’s ancestors - convicts, gold followers, assisted and self-funded immigrants – arrived in Australia between the 1820s and the 1920s. Many lived on Darug and Wiradjuri country and participated in changing that Country. Archives and oral history have helped Bennett to create stories of these people and places in this ancient landscape. She visits the places where her ancestors lived, often camping, walking and sitting.
“My art is my stitched and pieced note taking, a record of my thinking as I investigate.” Using ‘found’ or repurposed cloth and paper, Bennett dyes, prints and writes on these, often on site, using local plant material. Some pieces are altered in shape as they pass through the dye pot. They are rarely ironed before stitching, rather Bennett uses the bumps and creases and takes advantage of any uneven shrinkage to create a geology and landscape of cloth. “In this textile landscape I create uplifts, crevasses, rivers, weathering and erosion. My work can operate as maps of place, people and time. Stains or marks left by previous use and by the dye process are akin to the marks left by natural and people-made processes on the landscape. Worn cloth is an opportunity to mend and patch and make amends for that which has a history. Not much is new and little is wasted.” “Sometimes my thoughts take my needle for a walk. Sometimes a walked stitch forms an image or a piece of text. Words represent people, places or thoughts. The viewer is free to connect the evidence I have left and create their own story. Another researcher or another family member with a different perspective would create a different story.” “Broken Dishes references damaged lives and Country; sorrows, scars, family violence, and struggle. It also refers to the beauty that can lie in what is broken and how we can work towards making something whole out of what is fragmented. Join us for the exhibition opening at Platform Gallery at 5.30pm on Friday 15 November 2019, a combined opening with Amy Bell's The Complete Works of Daisychain.  Malta by Pleasance Ingle 31 October – 13 November 2019
In this exhibition Katoomba artist Pleasance Ingle gently ruminates on her time spent wandering the tiny island of Malta. She uses a paired-back palette of delicate yellows, subtle greys, and blue gouache, accented with ink lines and shadows, to present the urban landscape of the island. “These are images of Malta as a built environment. A very small and ancient land that has been peopled for centuries. Spending any time here can give one a sensory overload. The congestion, the noise, the constant building, the dust and the garbage and sewerage smell. The ancient is cheek by jowl with the modern. Even in the tracts of open land there is not a rock that hasn't been touched by human hand." "There is a beautiful madness.” These works reflect the calm measured process of the artist, the absence of people and the chaos bringing the moody built environment into focus.  Grounded by Karen Gruber 11 - 28 October
In this exhibition artist Karen Gruber explores the ideas of acceptance and resistance, using watercolour, soft pastel, pencil and pen on paper. For her first solo show, Karen has interwoven her delicate artwork style with powerful themes to produce an exhibition that is both universal and deeply personal. There are times when Karen has needed to accept what was happening, or resist it and take a stance. Living with a personality disorder often makes this choice overwhelming and emotionally crippling. “I have come to appreciate that whether I accept or resist is not a stand-alone decision, but a reflection of my experiences and processes leading up to that choice," says Karen. "These in between moments where foundations of choice are built are my inspiration.” “Often an idea or concept will come to me during quiet times where I am just living, like an ah-ha moment when some parts of life have come together to form an image. From there I will start with a vague plan, lay some basic forms, then I let the art take its own shape. My works never end where I imagine them and the process of getting to know each piece as it manifests itself is very healing and insightful for me.”  He heard the call by Emma Magenta 20 September - 7 August
It’s not often we love an artist so much we invite them to have two shows in one year – but with the magical Emma Magenta, we just couldn’t resist. Emma, through her writing, filmmaking, art and social media presence, never tires of holding a mirror up to humanity, prompting deep reflection and, hopefully, change. My Year As A Man is Emma doing what she does best; social experiment as art. She spent a year documenting herself dressed as a man, and the result is an examination of patriarchal entitlement, and the process of trying to remedy this from within and without. “The process for this show was live performance, transformation of myself into “the cultural problem”, and as an almost shamanic process, undertaking through performance, writing and drawing, the act of healing.” The exhibition will feature still and moving image, alongside Emma’s drawings and writings. Join us as we examine patriarchy and its solutions through this once-in-a-lifetime exhibition.  Colour Flip by Madeleine Yates 30 August - 15 September
When you come to an event or an exhibition opening at Platform, it can feel like one big family – where values align, friends are made and collaborations spring to life. For us, family is the people we choose to spend our lives with, and so for our next exhibition we have brought together some of our favourite artists, staff and friends to celebrate what the word ‘family’ means to them. From families of birth, to chosen and logical families, from the relatives we love to hate, to the communities we choose to surround ourselves with, the group show Family is an exploration of all these relationships and more. FEATURING: Ona Janzen Leonardo Uribe Margot Turner Julie Paterson Kevina-jo Smith Sophie Conolly Madeleine Yates Adam Knott Bec Waterstone Chrissie Powell |
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Platform Gallery Pty Ltd
ABN 80 617 217 759 184 Katoomba St Katoomba NSW 2780 |
Get in touch:
02 4742 0047 hello@platformgallery.co |
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