Lucy James "Janice Darling" 12th March - 4th April

Ever heard of Janice Darling? You have now baby (said like a hooker in "Shaft").
Lucy James has introduced us to this beautiful Amazon with help from her number 11 scalpel, a Jane Fonda work-out session and a whole lot of colour. The wit and technical skill displayed in the work on Monday night, filled everyone with joy and giggles. We had such an enormously great time installing/opening Lucy's wonderful show, we hope to help with many more.

"Janice Darling"

Festooned in a black unitard and an eye patch, Janice Darling was discovered in a Jane Fonda Workout book. Six months before the images were shot for the book, Janice was hit by a car and thrown through a shop window. She lost her left eye, crushed her pelvis and broke both her legs. She maintained that she survived due to her smokingly fit bod. In this collection of collage, painting and artifacts, Janice has been immortalised through rainbows, flowers and bright swirly colours. This woman is obviously invincible, inspiring unfit women of the 80s to get off their arses and work it, Jane Fonda style. 

Biography

Armed with a medical scalpel and a keen eye, Lucy harvests images from discarded and forgotten books and melds them into carefully composed hybrids of form and meaning. Often floating on a sea of empty white, her works evoke a sense of fantasy emerging from the vast expanse of our collective imagination. Animals, plants and humans morph into and out of each other. Masses of collected and catalogued natural species burst and explode, and laser beams shoot rainbows out of the dead eyes of history. Touching on issues of inherited folklore, the commodification of pets and the exploitation of natural resources, Lucy's work appears playful and visually dynamic, while allowing for deeper interpretative meaning.

Lucy has studied Visual Arts, Fashion and Textiles and most recently completed her Honours degree in Fine Art in 2009. Since then, she has exhibited nationally and internationally, and at times dips her toes into the land of illustration and design. 

She wields her number 11 blade from a sometimes-sunny studio in the central highlands of Victoria, where she lives.

For more of Lucy James' work and other information go to her blog thewarmingroom.blogspot.com

The Seam "ToGetHer" 20th February - 11th March

"The Seam" consists of four very talented young women creating together in considerate harmony. They are Liz Francis, Alicia Stafford, Nikita Burt and Mardi Thorpe. They're work is ever changing, positively feminine and above all visceral in it's impact. In this show, stories and memories are displayed in wildly technical forms using different fabrics, bark, found objects, gloves, lamp shades, twine and wire. The response has been wonderful to this show and we thank "The Seam" for their wonderful work and we hold our smiles wide with excitement for their next one. 

To

Get

Her

Together is an exploration of lost worlds. It is a searching, a purposeful following of both fragile and resilient threads, a traversing through woven patterns of the hidden and the exposed.

The Installation recalls traditional ways of working and feminine ways of knowing. It embraces experiential processes of recreation and renewal, borrowing resonant objects of yesterday, and allowing new forms, textures, and relationships with both the synthetic and the natural alike.

The work of a unique collaborative art practice, Together reforms worlds of glass, rust, polyester and wire in a melding of shared stories, experiences and a steady searching of the natural world.

Biography

The Seam is a Melbourne based collaboration, creating participative and site-specific installations. We draw on our multidisciplinary practice to engage with others and explore everyday phenomena. We stitch, connect, notice, nap, gather, salvage, and re-imagine together.