Jenny Gibson, Molonglo 2, 1998. Image courtesy of the artist.
Jenny Gibson
Gallery 1
Friday 11 July - Sunday 3 August
Opening Thursday 10 July 2025, 6pm-8pm
Inside the Outside represents over 30 years of oil paintings, charcoal drawings and mixed media studies by Jenny Gibson. While Gibson has explored a range of subjects and techniques, a consistent theme in her work is the natural world of the Australian bush.
Gibson’s work derives from a lifetime of walking and camping in the wilderness. Her paintings rarely depict distant views, but instead focus on intimate experiences with nature. Rather than presenting the natural world merely as a background to human beings, Gibson's paintings express the immersive experience of the Australian bush as seen through her eyes.
Gibson’s aim to value the natural world up close for its own sake is now underpinned by her recognition of its importance in providing the oxygen essential to life. Historically, our society has seen the bush as a problem to be solved in order to create productive farms, and trees as commercial objects to be felled for building materials, paper, or firewood. While many non-indigenous Australians are beginning to learn from First Nations people to care for the land, instead of exploiting it, there is still a long way to go.
Inside the Outside includes many studies produced on site, allowing Gibson to capture impressions and responses to the environment with more immediacy than paintings made later in the studio. By presenting a ‘bush environment’ in this exhibition, Gibson aims to encourage appreciation of a natural world which is independent of human beings, but on which all living things depend.
About the Artist
At the age of 8 Jenny Gibson spent a year in the Mountain Ash forests of Narbethong, Victoria. This experience gave her a love of the bush which she has never forgotten. She later grew up in Heidelberg, Melbourne, which in the 1940’s had dairy farms on the Yarra River flats. There she was introduced to the visual arts by retired artist, Clewin Harcourt. It was not until she retired and her 3 children left home that she again felt able to pursue her interest in art by enrolling in a drawing course at Gymea TAFE. She was then living at Bundeena in the Royal National Park, so the bush was all around her. It became the inspiration for her early attempts at painting.
When she returned to Canberra after the death of her husband Jenny bought a house near the bushland at the foot of Mount Ainslie, adding a studio in which to paint more seriously. She completed a degree at the ANU School of Art where she experimented with many different media but finds working with oils the most satisfying. When doing studies on paper outdoors, however, she uses charcoal and water based mixed media as they dry quickly.