​

Tokarska Gallery  21 May - 7 June 2012 fade in fade out

Paint, Love and Labour. 

 

Artist and painter, Kathleen Mullaniff, has a second obsession. An obsession which is at once attached to and envelope her small studio. The visitor is invited into the garden, and eventually through a garland of soft winter hues that surround the entrance to her studio. The borders are dormant now. But cross the threshold into the studio and these same sleeping winter colours are revealed through line and mark, in a series of pristine canvases. Marianne North would recognize the samples of seedpods, branches, twigs, dried petals and leaves imported into the studio from the garden, the salvaged fragments that form the still life source for this series of immaculate paintings. The local girl, intrepid explorer and botanist and the inspiration for Kathleen’s new body of work, collected her specimens from the furthest reaches of the natural world. Her expansive travel and analytical account of the exotic, compliments Kathleen’s  newest work where stepping into the garden, has re-envigorated and affirmed the notion of place, the local close up, an intimate commune with the melancholy of change, the micro into the macro, William Blake’s ‘world in a grain of sand’. Text by Eugene Palmer.