Sally Anderson's New Works Explore 'Home' As Landscape, In A Pandemic Age

The concept of home has changed in 2020. For a lot of people, home has never been just one static place, and yet in the last few months that stasis has been forced upon us. In the midst of shelter-in-place orders, we’ve been directed to decide on a single location that represents our place in the world and stay there, hoping it keeps us safe.

Reframing the domestic space as a new landscape intrigues artist and new mother Sally Anderson. Her new body of work is entitled Bridal Veil Falls, the Window and the Piano Lesson, and was created almost entirely in lockdown. The pieces will be on display at Edwina Corlette gallery in Brisbane from tomorrow, in an exhibition that explores the fusion between Sally’s subjective experience of parenthood, and the collective endurance of pandemic paralysis.

Written

Sasha Gattermayr

Photo – Amelia Fullerton.

‘Sea Sway, Wave Gesture, Waterfall Curtain’ by Sally Anderson. Photo – Michelle Eabry.

Photo – Amelia Fullerton.

‘Augie’s Banksias, the Window and M’s Piano Lesson’ by Sally Anderson. Photo – Michelle Eabry.

Left: ‘Bundjalung Boormans Swamp Banksia and D’s Window’ Right: ‘Sea Sceen Belly’ by Sally Anderson. Photo – Michelle Eabry.

‘Dodd’s Blue Sky Window, Bundajung Banksias and Bridal Veil Falls’ by Sally Anderson. Photo – Michelle Eabry.

‘Half Blue, Blue Mountains Iris, 15th Century Hastings Room, Bonnard’s Sea View’ by Sally Anderson. Photo – Michelle Eabry.

‘Unfolding Room, Green, Pink, Brown, Blue’ by Sally Anderson. Photo – Michelle Eabry.

‘Bundjalung Boormans Birth Banksias with Blank Screen, through M’s Window’ by Sally Anderson. Photo – Michelle Eabry.

Writer

Sasha Gattermayr

5th of August 2020

Artist Sally Anderson moved her young family to a 10-acre property in Newrybar, NSW at the tail end of 2019, while their permanent Sydney home underwent renovations. What sounds like foresight was actually just luck, as the artist, her partner and 3-year-old son Augie moved to the Northern Rivers just before one of the most seismic years in living memory.

Now, they are waiting out the storm in an old farmhouse close to the sea, where Sally paints in a temporary studio she has set up in a spare bedroom.

The relocation has represented a shift in Sally’s practice, one that can be tracked through the body of work which make up her new exhibition, Bridal Veil Falls, the Window and the Piano Lesson. The pieces in this exhibition are deliberately lighter, less dense and more direct than earlier works, and reference the work of Matisse, Bonnard and Richard Diebenkorn. Though Sally already had fascination with domesticity as an artistic lens, this focus now has new parallels in the midst of stay-at-home orders around the world.

‘Since my son was born I have been making works referencing domesticity, motherhood and ways we experience landscape from the comfort of our homes,’ Sally explains. ‘Which is why you’ll find windows and screens within my work, and the viewer will be inside looking out.’ This allegory of motherhood – at its most optimistic a radical reframing of personhood, at its most morbid a trap – slots perfectly into the strange tableau the rest of the world have found themselves suspended in since March.

The natural world offers many allegories for human life: marriage, regeneration, motherhood and birth. The artist reimagines our experience of the domestic space as a new Australian landscape, one peppered with windowsills, cut flowers, blank screens and skyline outlooks. ‘Since lockdown, these works have taken on a new meaning,’ Sally concedes. ‘They now also reference our collective experience of lockdown.’

‘Bridal Veil Falls, the Window and the Piano Lesson’ is showing at Edwina Corlette Gallery in Brisbane from August 6th – 26th. You can find out more details here.