Mollie Rice

11 August - 14 September      Worlds Above, Worlds Below

Link to artist's website

Mollie Rice was born in remote Australia. She spoke of Katherine - Lightening Ridge where her Dad was an opal miner, the unstable Australian bush and small towns where she got good at listening.  By the time she had a drivers’ license she was gone. First to Bathurst for study then to Sydney where she taught, next London, travel, husband, 2 children and then back to Australia, WHY? And with out a thought she replied, “the big sky”.

She wondered how a sense of location affected an individual?  For her Sydney delivered another child and a life threatening illness that left her grinning, “I’m still here!” then a chance to study textiles at CoFA. It was a foundational language that became drawing and the observation, “drawing permitted things to be, without being a statement or an answer”. For Mollie Rice drawing seemed to be the business of listening to a location.

The works here were made in response to the walk across the Domain from the Art Gallery of New South Wales towards the city that for Mollie is the walk into a wall of silence. She watched it through her sketches made on the spot. Drawn blind as she said tracing the cities contours on to her page without lifting her eyes from her subject. And she listened, making a drawn record of the silent cities sounds, blind again, with out lifting her ears from her subject.

Her paintings access those field recordings in a shallow slippery space where foreground and background merge into blurs that could be either.  Here it's tempting to think of her subject, our city rendered as an unidentified place, enveloped by "the big sky" where only the sounds of place remain to give us a sense of location.

Tony Twigg