Sara Maher
A Hobart based artist who has lived in the state for nearly two decades, Sara's practice is primarily embedded in the space of embodied and thoughtfully researched encounter between herself and the physical and cultural environment of lutruwita (Tasmania). It is deeply tied to consideration of time and place, ecological consciousness, and atmospheres of unsettled cultural memory where layered histories intersect - in the land and in the psyche.
Through her making, imagination housed in her Irish and European ancestry is met by the weight of colonisation. Her poetic works are quietly unsettling as they attempt to apprehend a deeper acknowledgement of place.
Moving between the large and the miniature - across painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and installation - between abstraction and figuration - she enquires into notions of self in relation to how we occupy and experience space, both around and inside ourselves, physically and psychologically. Each piece is a meditation on materiality and a subtle metaphorical response to place and its energies - metaphysically charged by means of alchemic and gravitational processes, ambiguities of light and shadow, resonances of geological time, history prevailing in the land and the slowed correspondence of mind with matter.
Sara's practice invites wider and continuing dialogue with other artists’ inquiry. In particular, she has a long history of collaboration with sound artist Nigel Farley. This collaborative work explores the intersection of both artists' memories and experience of the Tasmanian and wider Australian landscape, reflecting on the subliminal threshold where visual and aural perception interweave.
Since completing studies in Fine Art at the National Art School (Sydney), and the University of Tasmania (Hobart), numerous funded opportunities have supported the development of Sara's work, including participation in Shotgun 2010, a succession of Arts Tasmania Natural and Cultural, and Dombrovskis Parks and Wildlife Residencies in remote Tasmania, a connected residency in Broken Hill (NSW), and representation in contemporary arts festivals across the state and on the mainland. In 2020 Sara will be a recipient of the Bruny20 Arts Fellowship, a national award supported by the Bruny Island Foundation for the Arts.
Selected exhibitions over the past five years include : Biennale Of Australian Art (2018); Hutchins Australian Contemporary Art Prize (2018) - highly commended; Bay of Fires Art Prize (2018); Sydney Contemporary (2017); Arts in Parks (Arts Tasmania/ Parks and Wildlife), Lake St Clair and Hobart (2017); Of the Half-light, Bett Gallery, Hobart (2016); Biophilia, Beaver Galleries, Canberra (2014); The Unconformity Festival, Queenstown, TAS (2014); and Echoic Memory, Catherine Asquith Gallery, Melbourne (2013). Sara is presently working toward a curated exhibition, Un/Touched Wilderness at Devonport Regional gallery, Tasmania, April, 2020.
Sara's works are held in private collections, nationally and abroad. She is represented by Bett Gallery, Hobart, Tasmania.
(July 2019)
Nigel Farley
Nigel explores a variety of sound art contexts through self-initiated recording projects and in collaboration with visual artist Sara Maher. Working with field recordings allows one to create relationships between realism and abstraction while explore a focussed listening at the margins of perception: Some soundscape projects become attempts to articulate ways in which the 'sounds of place' reflect time and a shifting constellation of sociopolitical and technological relations; others a way of linking identifiable sounds of place with the acousmatic (which establishes an ambiguous equilibrium between non-referential sound images).
Through gallery sound/installation, the consideration of soundscape in a spatial sense allows for a more ambiguous listening making one even doubt the source and location, and even the actual physical existence of sounds. This encourages audiences to become more active participants of music-making through the act of listening.
In connection with Maher, collaborative work has been supported by two funded commissions of site-specific work for arts festivals in West Coast Tasmania (Queenstown Heritage & Arts Festival, 2014) and Ballarat (Biennale of Australian Art, 2018). It includes work for Contemporary Art Tasmania (2011), 146 Arts Tasmania, and installed soundscapes for Maher’s solo exhibitions in both public and commercial galleries in Hobart and Melbourne. These draw on a conceptual basis linking the artwork, where transformed sounds are inherently linked to both artists' imaginative responses to place which inspire art making over time.
Nigel is also an improvising musician, playing double bass, and performs with the local Hobart improvisation community and other visiting interstate musicians.
(Nov 2022)
CVs
Sara Maher CV
Nigel Farley CV
A Hobart based artist who has lived in the state for nearly two decades, Sara's practice is primarily embedded in the space of embodied and thoughtfully researched encounter between herself and the physical and cultural environment of lutruwita (Tasmania). It is deeply tied to consideration of time and place, ecological consciousness, and atmospheres of unsettled cultural memory where layered histories intersect - in the land and in the psyche.
Through her making, imagination housed in her Irish and European ancestry is met by the weight of colonisation. Her poetic works are quietly unsettling as they attempt to apprehend a deeper acknowledgement of place.
Moving between the large and the miniature - across painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and installation - between abstraction and figuration - she enquires into notions of self in relation to how we occupy and experience space, both around and inside ourselves, physically and psychologically. Each piece is a meditation on materiality and a subtle metaphorical response to place and its energies - metaphysically charged by means of alchemic and gravitational processes, ambiguities of light and shadow, resonances of geological time, history prevailing in the land and the slowed correspondence of mind with matter.
Sara's practice invites wider and continuing dialogue with other artists’ inquiry. In particular, she has a long history of collaboration with sound artist Nigel Farley. This collaborative work explores the intersection of both artists' memories and experience of the Tasmanian and wider Australian landscape, reflecting on the subliminal threshold where visual and aural perception interweave.
Since completing studies in Fine Art at the National Art School (Sydney), and the University of Tasmania (Hobart), numerous funded opportunities have supported the development of Sara's work, including participation in Shotgun 2010, a succession of Arts Tasmania Natural and Cultural, and Dombrovskis Parks and Wildlife Residencies in remote Tasmania, a connected residency in Broken Hill (NSW), and representation in contemporary arts festivals across the state and on the mainland. In 2020 Sara will be a recipient of the Bruny20 Arts Fellowship, a national award supported by the Bruny Island Foundation for the Arts.
Selected exhibitions over the past five years include : Biennale Of Australian Art (2018); Hutchins Australian Contemporary Art Prize (2018) - highly commended; Bay of Fires Art Prize (2018); Sydney Contemporary (2017); Arts in Parks (Arts Tasmania/ Parks and Wildlife), Lake St Clair and Hobart (2017); Of the Half-light, Bett Gallery, Hobart (2016); Biophilia, Beaver Galleries, Canberra (2014); The Unconformity Festival, Queenstown, TAS (2014); and Echoic Memory, Catherine Asquith Gallery, Melbourne (2013). Sara is presently working toward a curated exhibition, Un/Touched Wilderness at Devonport Regional gallery, Tasmania, April, 2020.
Sara's works are held in private collections, nationally and abroad. She is represented by Bett Gallery, Hobart, Tasmania.
(July 2019)
Nigel Farley
Nigel explores a variety of sound art contexts through self-initiated recording projects and in collaboration with visual artist Sara Maher. Working with field recordings allows one to create relationships between realism and abstraction while explore a focussed listening at the margins of perception: Some soundscape projects become attempts to articulate ways in which the 'sounds of place' reflect time and a shifting constellation of sociopolitical and technological relations; others a way of linking identifiable sounds of place with the acousmatic (which establishes an ambiguous equilibrium between non-referential sound images).
Through gallery sound/installation, the consideration of soundscape in a spatial sense allows for a more ambiguous listening making one even doubt the source and location, and even the actual physical existence of sounds. This encourages audiences to become more active participants of music-making through the act of listening.
In connection with Maher, collaborative work has been supported by two funded commissions of site-specific work for arts festivals in West Coast Tasmania (Queenstown Heritage & Arts Festival, 2014) and Ballarat (Biennale of Australian Art, 2018). It includes work for Contemporary Art Tasmania (2011), 146 Arts Tasmania, and installed soundscapes for Maher’s solo exhibitions in both public and commercial galleries in Hobart and Melbourne. These draw on a conceptual basis linking the artwork, where transformed sounds are inherently linked to both artists' imaginative responses to place which inspire art making over time.
Nigel is also an improvising musician, playing double bass, and performs with the local Hobart improvisation community and other visiting interstate musicians.
(Nov 2022)
CVs
Sara Maher CV
Nigel Farley CV