Susan Eley Fine Art and Garvey|Simon are pleased to present Inhabit a collaborative exhibition featuring the abstract encaustic paintings by Amber George (SEFA) and the interiors in oil by Melanie Parke (G|S). Central to both George’s and Parke’s paintings lies the idea of the interior: the realm one physically occupies and the private, psychological space. Both artists paint as a means of recollecting and visually recording memory and recent experience.The exhibition will be on view at Susan Eley Fine Art through October 21st, 2021.
Amber George’s multimedia, encaustic paintings serve as a record of recent physical, mental and emotional journeys. George’s paintings, featured in Inhabit, reflect the artist’s painful and challenging experiences over several years of fertility treatments, resulting in the birth of her beloved daughter Hazel, and through to the present, raising a toddler during COVID-19. Her life as a new mother has resulted in what she says has been a “softening” of her artistic practice, resulting in more tender and playful creations. Her recent paintings, a visual diary of these past events, ask the viewer to consider space, home and comfort.
Melanie Parke’s recent and ongoing series of oil paintings of interior spaces celebrates the kitchen as the hearth of the home. The kitchen, which connotes warmth, food, nurturing, domesticity, companionship, rest and renewal, is the place where we begin and end each day, where we find comfort, take a minute of solitude and respite. Each of the 16 interiors, carefully selected for Inhabit, depicts a specific place, painted from imagination or source material that includes reconstructed memories or visions, both of places real and imagined. Parke takes pleasure in creating spaces in which people can metaphorically slow down. Her paintings are about finding slowness in a fast-paced world and asking, ‘what kinds of things reveal themselves during slowness?’
For more information on the galleries please visit – www.susaneleyfineart.com and www.garveysimon.com
