Field Notes

Naarm/Melbourne-based contemporary painter Lucy Roleff returns to Michael Reid Sydney with Field Notes – a quietly sublime collection of still-life paintings drawing upon a recent residency on the remote West Coast of Tasmania.

Depicting small domestic objects and detritus collected on her morning walks along the shore, the artist’s gently brooding and romantic interior scenes reflect the quiet rhythms of daily life amid the rugged splendour and elemental drama of the Tasmanian wilderness. “I was eager to immerse myself in the natural surroundings – wandering along the beach, collecting shells and intriguing objects, and watching the weather shift dramatically from my desk, which overlooked the water,” says the artist.

Roleff is interested in the act of looking – the way affinities form and objects familiar and fascinating can become talismanic vessels for our desires. Synced to the domestic sphere’s quiet, quotidian rhythms while containing echoes of past lives in their timeworn grandeur, these collected objects pull our focus, invite moments of reverie and compel us in ways that reflect our aspirations or ideas of selfhood.

“I came to relish a simple, domestic routine,” says the artist of her foray out in the field. “I was struck by a sense of being suspended in time, allowing me to imagine the lives of those who once ventured out to sea, those who waited and watched, and the anticipation that came with each change in the weather.”

The final remaining works from Field Notes by Lucy Roleff can be previewed and acquired by request before the exhibition’s opening in our upstairs exhibition space alongside Painting Now.

For enquiries, please email dean@michaelreid.com.au