Zoe Grey

Congratulations to Tasmanian-based artist Zoe Grey, winner of the 2024 Hadley’s Art Prize for her work The Shape of Rock. One of Australia’s most lucrative art awards worth $100,000, the annual acquisitive art prize is awarded to the most outstanding portrayal of the Australian landscape.

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 memory and place, while also drawing on her experience in the Arctic in mid-2023, when she undertook art residencies on the islands of Svalbard and Lofoten. Like Tasmania, these Norwegian islands are well known for their dramatic, mountainous terrain, and Grey found herself drawn to areas that reminded her of home, such as the ocean or trees, resulting in paintings that Grey observes is “visually quite similar” to past work.

Grey graduated with a first-class honours degree from the University of Tasmania’s School of Creative Arts in Hobart in 2018, and has since remained in Hobart, working out of the artist-run studio and gallery complex, Good Grief Studios. However, she returns regularly to Marrawah, which she describes as her “grounding place.” Following her arctic residencies, Grey spent the summer in Marrawah, “realigning and feeling the comforting weight of the familiar landscape.” The town is famous for its big surf, wild weather, and fiery lichen-covered rocks. These elements are evoked in Grey’s paintings, along with the double peaks of Preminghana (formally known as Mount Cameron West), which overlooks Tasmania’s most westerly settlement. When Your Heartbeat Falls Between Feeling and Sound, 2023, captures the churn of the ocean and notoriously rocky shores. It was painted immediately on Grey’s return from Norway, and references her comfort-seeking behaviour during the residency, rather than depicting a direct representation of the landscapes. Unsettled and experiencing homesickness, Grey found herself visiting the ocean, seeking a connection to home. The resulting works are not literal depictions of Norway or Tasmania, but instead draw on memories to reflect on the experience of being in and out of place.

The title of The Bright, White Night, 2024, conjures up visions of Svalbard’s midnight sun and glacial peaks. However, it is more overt in its reference to the dual locations than the first painting. The silhouette of preminghana, which is a recurring motif in Grey’s paintings, sits in front of a spidery outline of a mountain on Svalbard. Grey recalls the concurrent feelings of awe and isolation on Svalbard, being surrounded by dramatic mountainous landscapes and yet unable to explore beyond the settlement unless accompanied by someone with a shotgun due to the presence of polar bears. Some of the charcoal and ink drawings made during this time are included in the exhibition. She remembers, “I was really struggling and I sat down to make a work about home using memories. My tears are in it. It was deeply cathartic. Through the process of drawing, that place was with me.”

In Tasmania, the natural landscape informs so much of the state’s creative output. For many artists, the challenge is how to represent the complex relationship between humans and the landscape, beyond pictorial landscape painting. Grey says, “there are a lot of things I try to push back against [regarding] traditional landscape painting,” such as “making work without a definite horizon line, positioning the viewer within.” Grey uses “memory and mark-making” as a way of making work that is “non-representational.” While she occasionally draws in the landscape, she only paints in the studio, encouraging a “level of distance” and using “memory to recall” the environment. A shift towards a more abstracted landscape is evident in these newer works. There are fewer recognisable details like plants, while the use of line and colour is bolder, as seen in the vibrant oranges and blues of In the Longing, 2023. Her paintings are less about pictorial representation, and more about unpacking the complex relationship and connection to place. As Grey observes about her current body of work, “it’s about my connection to home, but through the lens of another landscape. Being far away in a new place crystalises the enormous role home plays in my identity.”

Grey has been experimenting with ceramics since taking part in Despard’s Painters on Pots exhibition in 2022. Complementing Grey’s paintings will be a series of ceramic “rocks,” which echo the shapes and patterning of the rocks in her two-dimensional work. Decorated with underglazes, the sculptures play with depth, the addition of lines and marks exaggerating the rocks’ soft facets. Grey says these works are “a nice way to play. I’m endlessly trying to be playful and experimental.” This sense of joy in mark-making is evident in not only the ceramics, but also Grey’s paintings. It’s this liveliness that really conveys Grey’s genuine affection for and connection to the landscape.

This article was published in Artist Profile, issue 67

EXHIBITION
Hadley’s Art Prize
3 – 25 August 2024 
Hadley’s Hotel, Hobart