FROM AUGUST TO AUGUST - REDEFINING A PRACTICE

Manning Regional Gallery 12 November - 13 December 2020

“From August to August”, a nod to Vicki White’s year by year lease on a Taree studio, documents her art practice over the last few years. Following a serious illness in 2015, a psychologist told her the way we respond to life is ‘organistic’, rooted in our genetics & DNA. This made sense to White, whose response to her illness had been to return regularly home to the Manning Valley of NSW & immerse herself in familiar landscape, searching for a way back to an art practice derailed by Guillain Barre Syndrome, a condition where she became totally paralysed, & had to learn to walk & use her arms & legs again.

The playful journey & immediacy of the studio ‘process’, is front & centre to this exhibition, exploring the myriad iterations of ideas that speak symbolically & metaphorically to the human condition. Vulnerability & uncertainty, solace in the familiar, walking through a landscape of one’s own making. Video, photographic collage, & painting, explore the theme of ‘pilgrimage’. The late Irish poet & philosopher John O’Donohue continues to inform her visual response to this experience - the idea that there is a change of mind & heart when one returns to a familiar landscape. “The outer landscape becomes a metaphor for the unknown inner landscape”.