John Nelson, Silent world 1A, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist.
Racheal Bruhn & John Nelson
Gallery 1
Friday 16 May - Sunday 8 June
Opening Thursday 15 May, 6pm - 8pm
Traced Life brings together the paintings of artists Racheal Bruhn and John Nelson who both picture their worlds through painting to investigate the shadows and echoes of past stories. Through works exploring broken stories and experiences of loss, Traced Life presents two different perspectives on time, place and narrative.
Racheal Bruhn’s reflective watercolour installation looks to the leaf as a motif to grapple with grief after the death of her mother, exploring the family tree as a meditation on passed time, stories unrecalled, and unfinished conversations. Bruhn presents a family tree with five hundred leaves, each representing a year lived by her mother, father and her grandparents on both sides, with small delicate marks forming a rich and textured whole. Patterns found within Bruhn’s paintings often recall historical fabric designs to make sense of loss in a context where women’s work continues to be undervalued. Through pattern making, repeated production and the redeploying of symbols, variation of leaf shapes and textures against dominant background colours to comment on absence and silence.
Like Bruhn, John Nelson’s paintings work to explore broken narratives. Nelson’s works emerge from observations of his surroundings. Evening walks, gardens, ponds and still water, found and grown objects inform his exploration of the discarded and overlooked in this world. Nelson explores the found, focussing on the simplicity of a closely observed object that is usually not so revered, inviting the audience to anchor their stories. With diptychs of everyday objects paired with landscapes, Nelson presents a broken narrative that asks to be repaired, relinked; a lost landscape, a misplaced object, an image that suggests a larger narrative.
Together in Traced Life, Bruhn and Nelson present perspectives on time, place and stories that are both shared and divergent. Through their exploration of fractured narratives and loss, the exhibition offers meaning that is at once personal to the artists, but of significance for us all.