Stephanie Tabram: Lessons from the Land

JOIN STEPHANIE'S WAITING LIST HERE

PURCHASE EXHIBITION CATALOGUE HERE

This highly anticpated exhibition by Stephanie Tabram once again establishes her as one of Australia’s most collectable painters. Almost two years to the day since Stephanie’s last show, a conscious decision was made by both artist and gallery, to provide Stephanie the time and space to create this — her most extensive and ambitious body of work yet. 

At a studio in the heart of New Norfolk overlooking the Derwent Valley, canvases, rectangular and circular, lean against white walls, their painted surfaces turned away. A single image is exposed – the one Stephanie Tabram is working on at the moment. One quivering painting at a time is enough, until everything is complete. Only then will the gallery of separate moments be brought together, and their harmonies and whispered conversations released. Over many months, as I have made visits to this space, wonderment has been augmented by a gentle oscillation between the tangibility of the real world, and the mysterious hand of the artist.

A sweeping wash of pigment initiates each proposition, holding breadth and depth in a field of potential. Over hours and days and weeks, the artist works from the horizon up and over to the sky, and down and into the foreground. Methodical and measured, the layers intensify with each pass, bringing forth highlights, and pushing back shadows – reality emerging. In bringing each image into the light, Tabram walks a fine line between two states of being – an active articulation of the outer world, and a quiet internal meditation. 

Excerpt from catalogue essay by Jane Deeth, 2023

Stephanie Tabram, born in the United Kingdom, presently living and working outside of Hobart is one of Tasmania’s most collected artists. Tabram has been painting for more than thirty years, having completed her studies in Sydney in 1989. Her exquisite paintings speak of the Tasmanian landscape like no others. They are the landscapes of only this morning and yet, are evocative of the quality of image reserved only for memory. The paintings are lit —like the heaving Australian sky— from within. The detail and perfection of shadow and reflection goes beyond the photographic, her paintings are truly aglow.

Tabram’s work plays masterfully with the eternal nature of the traditional landscape painting and the instantaneous and transparent quality of film. Her images — though still, private, almost lonely —are pregnant with suspense. Tabram lets us linger in the last of the golden light on the dry grass before the clouds roll over - and then in the thick air of those swelling clouds the moment just before the storm breaks - and then in the silence of the empty highway, silver with the recent rain and lined with puddles as still as glass.  

CLICK HERE TO JOIN STEPHANIE'S INTEREST LIST