Alison Smith
Urban development explored through printmaking and drawing
Wed Feb 3 - Sat Feb 20 2010
Opening Thursday 4 Feb 2010, 6-8pm
Alison examines issues of permanence and transience in the urban environment through woodblock prints, silkscreen prints and drawings.
Currently studying her Advanced Diploma of Fine Arts at the Newcastle Art School (TAFE), Alison has taken inspiration from her Newcastle city surrounds, focusing attention on the many building sites which seem a permanent fixture of our city streetscapes.
The aesthetic qualities of line inherent in scaffolding lend themselves to explorations of the impermanent nature of the urban landscape which is in a continuous cycle of demolition and rebuilding, the cityscape shifting and changing with time. Eventual demise is implicit even in new foundations and the strength of cement and steel.
The printmaking on exhibition includes multi-layered silkscreens which grew out of Alison’s photographic practice, and complex woodblock reduction prints where the ink takes on a lush surface quality. The imagery here becomes less referential through abstraction and a focus on texture and line.
A recent visit to Hong Kong – a place synonymous with high rise development – lead to a suite of drawings which thematically compare this built environment to our own local one. The only thing permanent is the inevitability of change.
