The Last Great Wilderness
Darren Knight Gallery, Waterloo
until 6 October 2007
Left: The colour of concrete 2007, watercolour, pencil & acrylic on paper, courtesy tha artist and Darren Knight Gallery, SydneyThere's nothing slick about Michelle Ussher, but there are moments when she sails perilously close to a kind of hippy-dippy fantasy art, and this may be what makes her so interesting. Watercolour is her medium, and her approach is painstaking and 'descriptive' (as opposed to gestural and expressionistic), yet she is not seeking to document the world around her in any literal sense. This series of (mostly large) works on paper exhibits a fascination with built structures, monolithic statuary and architectural order, yet the resulting paintings have a translucent delicacy, as if she is peeling away an outer skin to reveal a slightly dreamlike world within. In the wrong hands this could fail terribly, but Ussher displays an honesty of observation and a refusal to make glib marks, and this visual 'sincerity' is what makes her work stand out from much of the work of the genre. There is undoubtedly a worldwide resurgence in both drawing and watercolour, surprisingly coming from youger artists, and the watercolour medium can impart a samey-ness, which Ussher thankfully transcends.
More images at: http://www.darrenknightgallery.com/artists/ussher/110907/index.htm
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