Painter Jedda-Daisy Culley always knew she wanted to be an artist. As she puts it, ‘all paths were always leading to art’. After completing an MFA in landscape painting, and exhibiting professionally over the past few years, Jedda-Daisy’s latest body of work depicts landscape in a more personal way.
Her current exhibition, Burns at the Land’s Brim, references Sidney Nolan’s Desert and Drought series, and documents a trip Jedda-Daisy took with her family through central Australia. The mapping project is both a representation of real locations, and a sweeping exploration of Australian creation stories. Jedda-Daisy is also interested in viewing landscape through a feminine lens, where rich pigmentation and warm tones convey a sense of earthly fertility.
A night spent in Marlinja (Northern Territory) was particularly formative in inspiring this exhibition. ‘I woke in my swag to see the sunrise and the moon set; one side of my world was lilac blue and moon beams, and the other, a fire of reds and pinks’ the artist recalls. ‘I got a glimpse of the land as if I was above the curve of the earth’s spherical form.’
In an effort to capture some of this magic, Jedda-Daisy created watercolours and small drawings whilst on the road, later bringing them back into the studio (alongside found rocks and treasures). These preliminary impressions have since developed into both physical and conceptual landscape paintings, which the artist describes as ‘layers of land; earth masses rising like a swell of eaves; opalescent; light floods.’ (What a description!). The work in Burns at the Land’s Brim plays with ‘fluid landscape as a sensual flow of female form; soft curves and chubby arches, gushing valleys and canyons’ all the while, seeking to express the desert landscape ‘through the eyes of a woman.’ We love it.
Burns at the Land’s Brim by Jedda-Daisy Culley
March 24th to April 13th
Mild Manners Offsite Location – Special Group Studios
270 Devonshire Street
Surry Hills, New South Wales
