Online Catalogues

Altered States explores Australian identity and our changing relationship with our environment through photographs of the Australian Landscape which have been modified by the hand of the artist. By adjusting the expected vista, with the addition of foreign objects, figures or projections, these artists cause us to look twice at their works and question the land we inhabit and how we relate to it, now and throughout history.

Iya-nla means big mother. Using laborious techniques such as crochet and hand beading, Paula combines domestic cloths passed down from women in her family with recycled fabrics and yarns. The works function as sensorial triggers to explore the intersections of Paula’s family history with the Atlantic slave trade, colonisation and migration.

For Guy Warren personal experience and memory are vitally important, intertwining with subject matter across his works. Certain events and places had such strong impact that they appear constantly throughout the paintings, prints and drawings Warren has produced over the past six decades.
A canoeing trip down the Shoalhaven River Warren undertook in 1939, at the age of sixteen, and a block of land at the head of the Jamberoo valley on which Warren built a shed have both been integral to his practice. Images of the river, canoe and the ‘hut on the hill,’ all imbued with memories and fantasies, are a strong presence throughout his works and the complex overlapping of form found within the rainforest has impacted depth and patterning across his entire oeuvre.

Vicki Varvaressos’ works emphasize her inner feelings and emotions over objective depictions. Her dramatic figures contrast with a limited palette applied in broad, loaded brush strokes. After twenty years as a renowned figurative artist, her style eased its way into abstraction, and since then Vicki continues to work in both styles, with some paintings seemingly transitioning in-between.