Lucy O'Dohertys ‘The Calm and the Storm’ explores subject matter inspired by the increased focus on the intimacy of home life in recent years due to the pandemic, as well as the increasing frequency of extreme weather conditions outside of the home.
A play on the saying the calm before the storm, ‘The Calm and the Storm’ contrasts the tranquillity of the domestic realm against the landscape that melts and rages around us, noting how we are living in a peculiar and unsustainable age where the ‘calm’ of increased time at home and the ‘storm’ of climate emergencies seem to be happening all at once.
The lockdowns of recent years have inspired attempts at new subject matter whilst spending more time indoors, resulting in O’Doherty’s motifs of domestic scenery being examined with an even more intimate lens. Still lifes and portraits are genres previously unexplored through past bodies of work however during the unpredictability of recent times they have provided her with a sense of calm and proximity to loved ones during long days indoors.
Alongside the quietude of the lockdown lifestyle, anxieties over extreme weather events have grown more and more acute. Lucy became interested in painting the strange glowing forms of melting icebergs and trees whipped by wind during hurricanes whilst being commissioned to create artworks for ‘Climate Emergency: Feedback Loops’, a series of educational short films. The devastating floods in New South Wales and Queensland this year and persistent storms and rainfall due to La Niña have also had an impact on the type of landscapes depicted.
The jarringly different subjects explored in this exhibition appear dreamlike, they can flicker between the pleasant and the familiar to suddenly life-threatening. "My dreams often unfold in this way, one moment I’m walking through the corridors of my family home and the next overwhelmed by a tidal wave."
Viewing this exhibition will give some sense of wandering through a dream, with hazy, warm moments of familiarity interrupted by the anxieties and danger of a world increasingly melting and morphing before our eyes.
Lucy O’Doherty is an artist living and working on Gadigal land who specialises in soft pastel drawings and oil paintings that draw inspiration from memories, dreams and ethereal moments in the realms of the domestic world as well as the landscape. O'Doherty's preferred technique in application of both oil paint and soft pastels involves blending the mediums until hard lines begin to dissolve, creating vibrating impressions of objects and places that have the hazy quality of a fading memory. Her subject matter tends towards showing reverence for the natural world and an underlying anxiety over the precariousness of the man-made world.
O'Doherty is a former recipient of The Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship, as well as being a finalist in the Wynne Prize, the Dough Moran National Portrait Prize, Ravenswood Women’s Art Prize, Mosman Art Prize and received a highly commendation in the Pro Hart Outback Prize.
This is her third solo exhibition with China Heights gallery.