Riverbound

This month, Michael Reid Sydney + Berlin will present the latest work by leading Australian contemporary artist Catherine Nelson, who brilliantly recasts digital tools as a paintbrush for conjuring wildly immersive, impossible landscapes.

“From her studio in France, Nelson’s meditation on the Australian landscape carries the weight of distance, nostalgic romanticism, and the clarity of perspective that such remove can provide,” notes art adviser and writer Sarah Hetherington in the catalogue essay accompanying Nelson’s extraordinary new pair of works, Riverbound I and II.

Each image is a painstaking, labour-intensive digital construction, where every element is composed of dozens of photographs, creating what Nelson refers to as “distortion on distortion” or a type of hyper-collaging. Nelson’s intention is to capture “a more honest image that reflects my experience and emotional response to this staggeringly beautiful and unique part of the world.” Further, Riverbound marks a significant departure from Nelson’s macro/micro spherical previous series of works. Now the viewer is positioned within the scene rather than observing from afar.

Riverbound I and II reject the traditional single-point perspective of photography and are particularly striking in their temporal and spatial complexity. Instead, the images offer something more akin to the way memory works – an immersive, multi-layered experience. The tilted plane of the river becomes a mirror, the space between the sky and its reflection in the water is collapsed. Nelson describes this as “an absence of separation,” a unity that also speaks to an ecological interconnectedness.

For further information please email dean@michaelreid.com.au.