penny coss

island

Perth Galleries

August 26 – September 18

Feeling for Turtle 2011 acrylic on canvas 152 x 137

Lawless Zone 2011 acrylic on canvas 152 x 137

Inland Lake 2011 acrylic on canvas 152 x 137

Strange Attractor 2011 acrylic on canvas 152 x 137

Soft Ground Cover 2011 oil and enamel on canvas 198 x 204 cm

Squirt 2011 acrylic on paper 28 x 56 cm

Waterfall 2011 Oil on Canvas 38 x 35 cm

Lake 2011 Acrylic on linen 20.5 x 30.5

Lost Bird 2011oil on canvas 71 x 55 cm

Lost Bird Hovering 2011oil on canvas 55 x 71 cm

No Man’s Land 2011 acrylic on canvas 25.5 x 30.5

Lost bird over island water 2011oil on canvas 55 x 71 cm

Floating Sky/ Sinking Earth 2011oil and enamel on board 120 x 240 cm

Stadium Drift (Mar/April) 2010 acrylic on canvas 55 x 122

Dark Matter 2011 acrylic on Canvas 137x 152

Falling Against Newton 2011 Paper Mache 188 x 125 x 40 cm

Installation Perth Galleries

Installation Perth Galleries

Installation Perth Galleries

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Landscape and the matrix of imagination: an emptying out?

I often spend time walking through my local wetland region. In the span of these walks, thoughts give way to the act of walking, to

the rhythm of my body, present as I progress through the landscape. Unseen cambers and obstacles threaten my fall and brought to

the studio as I tease the natural laws of gravity with my paint in a race against time.

These local wetlands, bordered by an urban fringe, are unclaimed spaces, a ‘no man’s land’. Part memory, imagination and

reinvention, this place is my muse. With their diminishing water bodies the colours of dark glass, rise and fall. These breathe a hidden

history. That part of landscape 'that remains uncultivated is partly the memory it preserves of what hasn’t happened yet'.1

In the studio the drying pools of paint are aided by a traversing brush or rag with impatient rhythm, building histories absent but not

yet present. I paint the terrain in the heavy hot air that turns thin to cold during the dark winter months.

Recent and past urban planning of a dystopian force has made its ‘claim’ on these wetland areas and paved the way for orderly plots,

planted vegetation over once dredged lakes and a leveling of the ground over once meandering tracks of a purposeful nature and

bundled together with little connection to the historical terrain. With their diminishing water bodies this once creative region2 is

stymied with the matrix of imagination emptying out and so to fall in line with one concrete path to blindly follow.

Penny Coss 2011

1 Page 86 Paul Carter, Ground Truthing, Explorations in a Creative region. 2010 UWAP publishing IBSN 9781742580708

2 See Paul Carter, Ground Truthing, Explorations in a Creative region.

Perth Galleries

92 Stirling Highway, North Fremantle WA 6159

Telephone: 08-9433 4414 facsimile: 08-9433 4415

E-mail: admin@perthgalleries.com.au

www.perthgalleries.com.au