ETERNE

The result is Katie’s most audacious body of work yet and she will be presenting a polyptych! Polyptychs (an artwork created of usually, a main panel, flanked by wing panels) were most commonly created by early Renaissance painters, the majority of whom designed their works to be alter pieces in churches and cathedrals. The polyptych form of art was also quite popular among ukiyo-e printmakers of the Edo period in Japan. Very apt, as Katie’s work has been described as contemporary landscapes viewed through a European lens with a sense of the orient as well.

Bettina’s works consider the connection between material, form, nature, architecture and memory within contemporary ceramics. Organic sculptural and textural pieces – her latest colour palette for ETERNE breathes life into her biomorphic forms. This body of work draws from a recent residency in Hungary and also has been heavily influenced by a trip Bettina made with her family to the Great Barrier Reef where they sailed around the national park and explored the indigenous walking trails and snorkelled in the most remote, dazzling places. It was unlike anything she had ever experienced before. Beaches piled with washed-up coral bleached and broken, underwater rock formations with sheer drops covered in plants swaying with the current of the water.

Arising from flickering memories of time spent in nature with loved ones, ETERNE is offered by both artists as an honouring and tribute to nature and is something to be cherished forever.

“The body of work has been split into two distinct peripheries. Environments I have found solace, comfort and peace in, as an adult mostly, and places I have explored with my beloved. The other is derived from nostalgic photographs of the small farm my parents owned when I was young, we would go there every single holiday until the farm was sold. A lot of my strongest memories are of being ages 7-12 and wandering the length and breadth of the property by myself and of being alone in nature, mostly by the creek. We called it ‘the creek’ but it’s really the Pappinbarra river. The two peripheries are interconnected by a shared notion of solace and comfort in nature. And that nature becomes a keeper- of-memory, a site of transformative experience.

I think of my paintings as love letters to experience and place, to the environment and the land. Mementos and tokens of my appreciation and delight in nature. I want to convey the joy that I feel for the natural world in my work.”

– Katie Daniels

Katie Daniels is an emerging artist with a Bachelor of Creative Arts from the University of Wollongong, a Master of Arts Curatorship from the University of Melbourne, and most recently a finalist in the prestigious Wynne prize 2018. A luminous landscape painter with a distinctive colour palette and dreamy aesthetic, Katie captures the essence of the Australian landscape enhanced with an evocative sense of other worldliness.