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donna smullen | hand narratives

opening night | wednesday march 16, 6–8pm
exhibition | march 16-april 5, 2011

Download pdf version of DONNA SMULLEN | HAND NARRATIVES

Hands are as unique and individual as our faces. They are one of the principal ways that we communicate with each other, express ourselves to the world and our practical means for creativity. Donna Smullen has dedicated her latest collection to a part of the body that she believes is often overlooked. “There’s an earthiness about hands,” she says. Kate Hopkinson-Pointer, owner of Gallery@28, says that “Donna is so technically assured, she makes painting look effortless and endows the familiar with great beauty.”

These small studies of hands are sometimes shown holding objects such as fruit, eggs, beads or coins. None are casually chosen: they are symbolic and speak of man’s relationship to our planet, to our origins and our power to shape and influence our future. The female hand holding an apple is an obvious allusion to Eve, the Garden of Eden and man’s fall from grace. But it has a contemporary interpretation too. We hold the future of our planet in the palm of our hand: how we treat it will determine man’s own future.

Nature is deeply influential throughout Smullen’s paintings. She works with mixed media on unprimed timber, noting the “corrolation between timber and skin”, both living things. Occasionally, she affixes paper to the timber, like skin on the body of the tree, drawing upon it using acrylics, graphite and coloured pencil.

There’s an intense intimacy in her paintings, a tenderness almost that is the complete antithesis of, say, fellow Brit Lucien Freud’s detached, analytical depictions of the human body. In a world of fragmented relationships where technology is the motor of communication, Smullen’s work could be seen as a profound comment on the loss of intimacy between people.

Hailing from Liverpool in the UK, Smullen studied fine art at Lancashire University where she graduated with a first class honors degree. Primarily interested in abstract art, after she moved  to Australia, she found she missed working with the body and returned to portraiture and figurative studies. “I work impulsively,” she says. “It’s not a mechanical process and often the paintings only reveal themselves to me over a period of time.” Not unlike the way a hand opens to reveal the palm, perhaps.

Kate Hopkinson-Pointer
GALLERY@28
0402 144 350
khp@galleryat28.com.au

Previous Exhibition Media Releases
Peter Berner
Michael Fairweather | Nature Morte
Kate Hopkinson-Pointer | Where the Light Touches
Greer Clayton | Ocean
Gallery@28 Group Exhibition: Water
Cath Fogarty: Prima Vera
Carole Corrie: Journey to Surface
Ron McBurnie: A Journey Through Summer
Stewart Crawford
Nahomi Yoshizawa: Inner Journey
Gallery@28 Group Exhibition: Erotic
Michael Fairweather: The Salon
Bianca Van Rangelrooy: Mutable Landscapes
Yiwon Park: My Own Pacific Ocean
Donna Smullen: Written on the Body
Chas Glover
Leah Fraser: The Jabberwocky Prayers
Peter Berner
Pedro Vasques: Edge of Civilisation