9 - 25 November 2023
about the exhibition
Lucienne Rickard is an extraordinarily talented artist from Tasmania whose work is marked by a sharp eye for detail, zealous imagination and a fastidious, almost obsessive, mode of execution. Lucienne explores themes such as beauty, death, brutality and obsession with some works considering the gradual accumulative death and others, the aggressive chasing and confronting of death. This exhibition brings together two distinct bodies of work which, although vastly different in medium, process and imagery, speak to and relate to each other. Using biro pens on paper, Lucienne revisits an early fascination with Hemingway’s book, ‘Death in The Afternoon’, and has scoured the photographs included. She explains, “This time, rather than being captivated by pageantry and ornamentation, I have zeroed in on the crowd. They are tiny and blurred in the background of the action, but I have zoomed in, fixating on particular faces and tableaus, and projecting them vastly enlarged onto my paper. I use the image like a pattern and make stitch-like marks over it, repeating and layering. The process of drawing is an examination. I am asking why they are there, what they felt and what parts of myself I see in them.” The charcoal impressions Lucienne has paired with these drawings are “a reference to the constant making that I have been exposed to throughout my life. I have always been fascinated by the machine-like clacking of knitting needles, the intricate weaving and knotting of crochet that I saw my mother and grandmother engaged in…Hundreds of hours of work can be bought for $2 in a tip shop. In making impressions of the handiwork, I seek to animate these relics, give them power and value again. I’m also asking, like the crowds, what parts of myself I see in them. Where is that thread in me?” As always, Lucienne continues to explore non-traditional drawing techniques in ways that are captivating and powerful.
Lucienne Rickard completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Queensland College of Art in 2001 and, in the following year, Honours (First Class) in Fine Arts at the University of Tasmania. Having completed her PhD in Fine Arts at the University of Tasmania and been awarded the Rosamond McCulloch Studio Residency in Paris, she has had work in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Australia. Lucienne has exhibited with Beaver Galleries since 2010, with successful showings at both the Sydney Contemporary and Melbourne Art Fairs. In 2014, she was selected to participate in “Primavera”, the Museum of Contemporary Art’s annual showing of bold new work from young Australian artists and, in 2018, included in the Art Gallery of NSW Dobell Australian Drawing Biennial. Starting in 2019 and extending for a few years, Lucienne undertook a project at the Tasmanian Museum and Gallery where, for weeks on end, she would draw in painstaking detail a recently extinct species of animal or plant and then erase the drawing before starting another. Using the same piece of paper over and over again, the result is a gradual wearing down that captures the marks and indents of loss, leaving only traces of what was once there. Lucienne’s work is included in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of NSW and the University of Tasmania.
