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Caro
Liddell Art Reviews |
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CARO LIDDELL: The Field, Fox Galleries,
103 Brunswick St.
Until September 8 2005
HUMAN ENDURANCE ON A GRAND SCALE
AN occasionally gruelling trip to southern China provided the
subject matter for an intriguing new show of paintings and sculpture
at Fox Galleries in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley.
Entitled The Field, Caro Liddell’s varied works convey
the sense of space she experienced on her travels, focusing in
on a segment of the endless cultivated areas, rice paddies and
other ‘fields’,
including mountains, she saw there.
One of the three huge oils in the show shows a black figure in
a sampan hat amid a green expanse; a peasant, bent by his labour,
sewing rice into the dark water.
He is one among millions, but it is a lonely scene in every sense:
the painting isolates a small area of the vast paddies, and the
man is alone, planting a huge field and enduring it. ‘’It’s
not pleasant, though it might look aesthetic,’’ Liddell
says, and indicates that the water seems to be streaming from
him, towards a red blotch in the corner. “Passion, pain
and blood,’’ she says.
The man – Everyman -- is giving his lifeblood to the field.
This was the most painful aspect of Liddell’s China trip:
observing the poverty, the grinding work, and the need for endurance,
she says.
Then there was the personal discomfort: “It’s not
like going to Bali and lying on a beach. There is constant hassling,
and I am not someone who likes crowds, and I hate being pushed.’’
Which is one reason why she lives at the end of a dirt road at
Minyon Falls, high in the hills of northern New South Wales.
A Briton, Liddell came to Australia partly to escape the crampedness
of England. Here she at last has studio room to stand back and
see her work from a distance, and an inspiration in the wilderness
around
her. Space, she says, is the recurring aspect of her work that
she cannot
escape:
emotional, geographical, spiritual.
The pastel and graphite works in The Field are perhaps the most
accessible, being prettily coloured, with fetching dots or dashes
giving the idea of things growing, of multiplicity in an agricultural
setting. Closer examination shows the colour and effect to have
been achieved by an assault upon the thickly pastelled surface – either
with a hammer, or a piece of graphite, and even a fistful of
nuts -- creating leaden scars and puncture holes in the paper.
The result has a great delicacy to it but this is work that has
been beaten into existence. Liddell confesses she relishes this
kind of controlled energy – a physical confrontation with
the surface and her subject. It’s one of the reasons she
enjoys the big canvases – they
take on a life of their own.
The show’s centrepiece is an installed sculpture – the
heads of the 12 apostles cast in cement, sitting on the floor
in a field of rice, and in the shape of a cross.
They comply with the theme of multiplicity, and also make up
their own force field, pulling the viewer irresistibly towards
them. |
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ARTS the
northern Star Saturday feb 1 2003
RESPECTED UK ARTIST EXHIBITS AT THE TUB GALLERY
The striking large canvas workd of now Minyon falls resident Caro Liddell will
be displayed in Byron bay this month.
After gaining significant reputation in the UK, Liddell said the lure of Australia
proved too much and in 2001 she and her husband moved to the area.
While getting to know the byron area, she discovered the high quality local galleries
and was particularly impressed with the large airy spaces of the Tub Gallery
where her work will open on February 8.
Caro’s primary artistic reputation has been for printmaking but in recent
years she has been working on large scale canvses, some up to three metres wide.
The large scale oil paintings with accompanying drawings and prints on show have
been created for her first solo exhibition in Australia.
The work has its roots in Australia and is the development of other work she
created in 2000-1, when she was awarded the Arthur Boyd trust at bundanon.
During her residency a major focus for Liddell was the Shoalhaven river. |
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ARTS REVIEW LONDON 31
MAY 1991
Continuing her series of exhibitions about the Australian outback
scene Rebecca Hossack gallery has, until june 15, a double show:
paintings by Robert Cambell nor and prints by Caro Liddell. Caro’s
coloured etchings are a record of the vivid impressions on her
of a tour of the Northern Territory in Australia.
Without any formal study she was employed in a print studio and
learnt the art of photo etching which had the advantage of her
being able to assemble disparate images, changing scales etc.,
and introduce the use of embossing the paper. She shows reproductions
of coloured maps, walked over symbolically with tiny foot prints
(her own, reduced from photocopies) embossing spirit figures,
introducing beer cans (also from photocopies) and with a talent
for colour, she tackles the burning sun full on. |
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Brisbane News 05 -11 2003
Art Phil Brown
MIND’S EYE
an artists’s ethereal works reflect the landscape of the
mind
Perhaps it takes an English person to be inspired by redback
spiders. Artist Caro Liddell may eventually become an Australian
however, she says, on the eve of the opening of Palimpsest, her
first exhibiton in Brisbane.
She and her husband, filmmaker Dominick Reyntiens, migrated to
Australia two years ago and are now living in the hippy hills
beyond Byron Bay.
But back to the redbacks for a moment. The large white eggs that
float in several of her serene and expansive landscapes were
inspired by redback spider eggs, which she encountered in Australia
as a visitor some years ago.
‘
I was intrigued that these beautiful, silken orbs could be full
of such potentially deadly creatures,’ she says.
I make a jokey reference to the son Redback on the toilet Seat
( a big hit a few decades ago for Slim Newton, you may recall)
but the reference falls flat. Being English, she’s never
heard of it, of course.
Actually, the figures traversing the canvas in RIVER VEIN and
other paintings are black and a little spider-like – human
hatchlings crossing an arid landscape. (Migration and, more ethereally,
transmigration are among her themes.) The landscape is less arid
in Sholhaven no.11, a work that dates back to 2000, when she
was an artist in residence at Bundanon, a property donated to
the nation by the late great Australian painter Arthur Boyd.
Caro’s first visit to Australia was in 1989, when she spent
six months in the Northern Territory. She visited aboriginal
communities, spent a lot of time with indigenous people and became
enamoured with rock paintings and other aboriginal art, resulting
in her first sell out exhibition Tracks in 1991 at Rebecca Hossack
gallery, London.
This experience seems to have stayed with her because there is
the suggestion of something vast an ancient about her landscapes.
She describes them as ‘emotional landscapes’ and
this is particularly evident in a couple of paintings that fearure
a somewhat ghostly female figure: against a dark apocalyptic
background in one and a vibrant, colourful one in another. These
works relate to Caro’s own travails – health & personal
tradgedy – and are perhaps the most personal of the works.
The smaller sketches and studies included in the exhibition show
how the artist moves toward the larger paintings. This should
help familiarise us with her work. She is relatively unknown
here, but has developed a growing reputation in England over
the past decade or so. In London, she caught the eye of the art
dealer Rebecca Hossack and, since 1991, has exhibited with her
at the prestigious Rebecca Hossack Gallery. Australia has been
her preoccuptation during these years, so it is no suprixe that
she eventually relocated here permanently.
Now she has a studio at her home in the idyllic setting of a
small community near Minyon falls. She revels in that environment,
though her surrounds inspire her to paint, rather than inspiring
the painting itself. Her work is informed more by the ideas of
the landscapes of the mind than by her local environs. Certainly
Bundanon and the Northern Territory have influenced her, but
not in a specific, realistic way. But the sense of space here
has definitely informed her “emotional landscapes’,
which seem ancient, universal and personal, with layers of meaning,
as well as layers of paint.
Rebecca Hossack has described Caro’s paintings as ‘intricate
palimpsests, recording the shifting flows of existence’.
A palimpsest is a parchment on which writing has been applied
over earlier writing, according to my Little Oxford English Dictionary.
And while this is actually true in some of the sketches, it pertains
also to paint in other works, an effect that adds to the timeless
ambience in some of the paintings.
This exhibition has been organised through Fox Galleries and
in an essay accompanying her show, director Michael Fox has written
that Caro Liddell ‘seems to have been destined to live
and work in Australia’ and the artist would certainly agree
with that, despite her wariness about the redbacks.
*Palimsest; An Exhibiton of Recent Paintings and Drawings by
Caro Liddell, until 7 November, Metro Artys Main Gallery, level
two, 109 Edward Street, the City: phone:3221 1527. |
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GALLERIES REVIEW LONDON
October 1998
Caro Liddell Luke Elwes
(image 24 ways to say Kangaroo)With its exposed roof beams and
cracked floors, Caro Liddell’s studio has the appearance
of a fragile vessel, washed up in south London with its cargo
of images brought back from journeys both physical and mental.
On one wall the outline of a continent contains, womb-like, a
circular dance of animal and human forms.On another rests a diptych
of long boats, shaped like seed pods and freighted with delicate
embryonic forms. And on another, a rhythmic shadow dance of spectral
figures sends signals across the line which divides man form
animal, and by extension, one life from another (24 ways to say
Kangaroo).
All are images that inquire in to body language, its living and
dying forms, and its representation in different times and places:
whether searched out in the parellell worl of marsupial forms
on the Australian continent, or discovered in the contents of
Russian mediaeval burial sites, or revealed in earlier investigative
drawings into the workings of the body, at once real and symbolic,
which the artist found hidden away in the archives of the Wellcome
Institute. Of these, one in particular has lodged deep in the
artist’s image bank, the delicate form of a man child floating
in a womb, ambiguously shaped, suggesting an upturned bottle
or primitive egg.
As in her earlier prints, for which she has become known in recent
years, these are images of crossing over, of (in her words) ‘transmigrations’:
from inside to outside, man to animal, body to spirit. Categories
and labels are dissolved as one form of life flows into another.
But where the prints were once crowded with decoration, adorned
with silver leaf and encased in heavy gold frames, now they are
shorn of embellishment, more ghostly and reflective, more deeply
felt.
Together with the new paintings at the Rebecca Hossack Gallery
they signal a search for a wider and deeper horizon.
Transmigration & Other Journeys
5 October – 31 October 1998 @ Rebecca Hossack Gallery W1
London |
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