Laree Payne Gallery is delighted to present a two person exhibition featuring new and recent works by London-based, Australian artist, Anna Higgins, alongside Gallery artist, Sarah Smuts-Kennedy.
Inner Life centres each artists' intuitive approach to art making, giving way to sense-feeling over language. With gently overlapping interests and sensibilities across many aspects of life and contemporary art practice, Higgins and Smuts-Kennedy's work, together, becomes a conversation about aesthetics and the divine, alluded to via light-filled, layered abstractions.
Working at a medium scale, Higgins presents four unique works, all of which contain a figurative component; two faces, two hands. Combining found archival imagery superimposed with that of her own, Higgins describes her expanded image-based practice as being "evocative of the past, memory and fleeting gesture." Romantic and dreamlike, Higgins' images carry an alluring and nostalgic quality, often suggestive of a sense of connection beyond the self.
Sarah Smuts-Kennedy presents three large scale oil on canvas paintings titled Two, Three and Four which continue on from the artists presentation with the Gallery at the Aotearoa Art Fair in May. Smuts-Kennedy's highly established and idiosyncratic 'Joy Field' language has taken years to emerge in brush and paint. 'Sung into being' by the artist in studio, sound has become an increasingly important aspect of the artists practice.
