Nicola Gower Wallis: Cloud Chorus
9 - 31 May 2025
Overview
Nicola Gower Wallis, Cloud Chorus

Nicola Gower Wallis returns to the gallery for her highly anticipated fourth solo exhibition. Following the complete sell-out success of her previous shows in Hobart, this 2025 exhibition is generating significant excitement among collectors and fans across the country.

 

 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the construction of a landscape, of how to best distill a story down into a single, flattened image. The narratives themselves are never very grand, collaged as they are out of a funny little jumble of scenes flashed past a car window, but it is in their mundanity that my tenderness for them lies. There is after all some genuine, cosmic divinity to the sight of three plovers standing vigil behind a couple of wheelie bins at midnight.

 

And through this puzzlement and pondering, I find myself attempting to describe not the landscape that is, but the secondary, tender landscape which drapes atop the first. This other landscape is a fluid, moving geography formed from a scrapbook of memory, sentimentality, and a kind of observed, prosaic mythology. It is not the well-worn, often travelled highway itself, but the nostalgia and familiarity which renders it numinous. It is not exactly a vision of paradise, nor a reflection in a mirror, but instead my dutiful attempt to articulate the incredible fondness I feel for the landscapes close to me.

 

- Nicola Gower Wallis, 2025

 

 

 Nicola Gower Wallis’ paintings recast the habitual as the exceptional, and the familiar as the fantastic. Her vibrant narrative works are based in small stories, be they folkloric passed down by generations, her daily musings or her nightly dreams; they carry the magic of the unverifiable, the rumoured and the imagined. One is reminded of the centuries of illustrative embellishment captured in miniature by the master painters of India. Much like these painters incorporated the tropes of stylised European backgrounds and exquisite Persian patterning into luminous depictions of their multi-faceted lore, Gower Wallis embellishes her memories with the floral tessellations of the Millefleur tapestries of the early Renaissance. She is inquisitive of every detail.

 

Gower Wallis begins simply: she describes the familiarity of her garden, walking up the paddock every morning and back every evening; she describes the chequered and changing greens of the paddocks surrounding hers. And she is soon enraptured by these events. The painter’s memories flood with mille-fleur. A thousand flowers blanket the fields and paddocks that Gower Wallis re-walks in her dreamscapes; the mundane is transformed into the meditative and elevated to the mythological.

 

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