Zoe Grey
Zoe Grey’s exhibition of paintings, drawings, and ceramics is inspired by mountainous islands on opposite sides of the world. Grey’s relationship to her hometown of Marrawah, on Tasmania’s west coast, has long informed her art-making. Her exhibition at Despard Gallery in Hobart Could You Ever Know Every Fold in the Mountain? continues her exploration of […]
Patrick Hall
“I am hoping to be a vector for empathy in a world no longer stable, where global ruins and war remind us of the way lives appear and suddenly disappear, the way a life can be made redundant in the almost imperceptible catch of a breath … all that is left is the shadow.” Hall’s […]
Posted in Essays, Exhibitions
Tagged Despard Gallery, Patrick Hall, the paper its written on
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Joshua Andree
Congratulations on winning the Packing Room Prize in the Hadley’s Art Prize. Can you tell me more about your work and the significance of its title, Once Still Water (Requiem for a Lake)? The west coast of Tasmania is a contested environment, it’s got 250 years of industry that’s degraded the land and the history […]
Posted in Exhibitions, Profiles
Tagged Despard Gallery, Joshua Andree, Moonah Arts Centre, Personal Geography
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Josh Foley
The task of writing about one’s process is a fraught one. For myself, there are many shifts of method and material between each exhibition and each picture that, by the time I’ve written this sentence, a new way of approaching the question of how to paint may have emerged. I remember, during my studies at […]
Posted in Exhibitions
Tagged Despard Gallery, Hyper Landscape, Josh Foley
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Harrison Bowe
Bowe’s art may at first recall the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich. We discern mist glazed heavens that offer visual cadences with Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818). As with Friedrich, Bowe approaches his subject as a sort of temple, describing the cliffs as “quartzite cathedrals.” But unlike Friedrich’s Wanderer, there is no […]
Posted in Exhibitions, Reviews
Tagged Despard Gallery, Harrison Bowe, Passing through
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Reconciling Disruption in Graham Lang’s Finding Form
Entitled Finding Form, Graham Lang’s upcoming exhibition searches for primal encounters through paint and sculpture. The elusive title gestures to many things at once, perhaps setting the stage for a type of origin story, or a juxtaposition between modern and pre-modern mythologies and ways of being. But Finding Form could signal an emerging form, and […]
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Tagged Despard Gallery, Graham Lang
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Todd Jenkins
The texture of the oil paint in Todd Jenkins’s Lunar Current, 2022, is at once delicate and densely packed onto the canvas. There is a sense that the painting is calling out be touched, as well as to be explored by the eye. Though the painting’s title suggests the moon-led movements of the oceans around Tasmania, the […]
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Tagged Add Jenkins, Despard, Despard Gallery
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Sam Field
I thought I saw Eden brings together a suite of paintings produced in the aftermath of Sam Field’s journey throughout Far North Queensland. Interrogating the act and impulse of travelling, Field contemplates the assumptions, projections, and mythologies that permeate our experiences of “othered” places. Embedded within the series is a reflection on innocence lost: the […]
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Tagged Despard Gallery, Pippa Mott, Sam Field
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Patrick Hall
Steven Joyce of Despard Gallery has shown Patrick Hall’s work at the renowned Chicago art fair, Sculpture, Objects, Functional Art (SOFA), on a regular basis. In 2001 Hall became the first non-American artist to feature on the cover of the SOFA exhibition catalogue. The reason Hall (born in 1962) was a hit at this fair […]
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Tagged Despard, Despard Gallery, Patrick Hall
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Josh Foley
Foley’s most recent body of work responds to the state of hyper-saturation which characterises our informational and affective lives in the present. Many of these paintings respond to distinctly contemporary stories, perceptive experiences and technologies; this is, in a sense, post-internet art, with the added irony of being carried out in the ‘analogue’ medium of […]
Zoe Grey
I grew up on Peerapper country, in Marrawah, a tiny town on the western edge of lutruwita/Tasmania. Isolated and exposed, Marrawah has a rugged environment – the trees bend in roaring winds and the swell rises high out of the Southern Ocean. Time spent within this unique landscape guides my painting practice and my process observes […]
Geoff Dyer: Selected Works from the Artist’s Studio
In 2019, Dyer told Lucy Hawthorne that, in remission from cancer treatment, ‘what’s important is being here and getting on with your work…the exterior things fall away.’ The landscapes from Dyer’s later life which are currently on show with Despard attest to just this devotional ethic: energetic, painterly, and vital in their textured rendering of the sensate […]
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Tagged Despard Gallery, Geoff Dyer
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Zoe Grey
In her inaugural solo exhibition, emerging Tasmanian artist Zoe Grey traces her intimate connection to the remote coastal town of Marrawah.
