OUt FROM UNDER ME 2015

exhibition at Hill Smith Gallery Adelaide & Beaver Galleries Canberra

Artist Profile article and excerpt from Canberra Times Review by Sasha Grishin:

'..In this exhibition, a strong lyricism prevails coupled with a passion for exploring complex, yet subtle surfaces. [Melinda Schawel] appears to be an artist who acts as a medium surrendering to her process of work, so that an external form grows out of an inner chaos and a new reality assumes a palpable form.

The Cluster series forms the backbone of her exhibition and is her finest work I have seen to date. The intricacy and mystic beauty of her small created microcosms is quite remarkable as the viewer is drawn into an exploration of the breathing nuances of her surfaces. Within this delicacy, there is also something which appears quite fragile and in a strange way inherently tragic.

Her clusters seem to have been breathed into being and are then suspended in space, while bathed in luminosity, only to subsequently fade and merge into chaos. It is this ephemeral quality that enhances the trembling beauty of her art.'