Manchester Road
24 July - 17 August 2019
OLSEN Gallery, Sydney
Manchester Road - exhibition statement
It’s the summer of 1979…..or maybe 1980? That is the problem with memory, it’s hard to pin down. The works in Manchester Road, represent artist Michelle Cawthorn’s reimagining of a childhood home and garden that no longer exists and draw on personal memories associated with this period in her life. No longer the 1970s, and not yet what the 1980s will be, this transition from one decade to another acts as a metaphor for this twilight time in her childhood.
After travelling around Europe for a year in a combi van with her family, the house at Manchester Road that the family moved into on their return to Australia was a tired, post-war 1950s fibro home with large backyard in need of repair and renovation. Carpets were torn up and replaced, walls were painted, bathrooms retiled, the garden replanted, the Dulux colour chart never far from reach. This period also marked a time of more intimate change too. Puberty had begun and things sprouted in places unexpected, thoughts shifting from Barbies to boys.
The works in Manchester Road explore all these memories unapologetically, but in ways often as subtle as the changes were themselves. These are hinted to in the titles of the works which are suggestive rather than prescribed. The repetitive hatched mark making that characterises the artist’s practice, generates a meditative space that allows her to access memory unconstrained. The smaller works on paper reflect a more immediate approach to this process of memory recall, their scale enabling her to navigate their visual and emotional information with more immediacy. The larger works on paper and canvas riff on the smaller works, their scale allowing both artist and audience to linger longer in this reimagined place.
July, 2019
All images High Res Digital, except images 1-3, courtesy Docqment