Wanderings – Lynsey MacKenzie, Rowan Paton and Julie-Ann Simpson

An exhibition of works by painters Lynsey MacKenzie, Rowan Paton and Julie-Ann Simpson.

Meandering through a painted landscape in which the path is drawn, erased and remade, Wanderings celebrates painting’s materiality and power to reveal new worlds.

To wander is to move without a fixed course, rambling; to go astray.  To walk without a destination.  Often, this is when we discover something new – and the same is true in painting.  These painters share a love of wandering, inviting chance to play a role in the work, allowing themselves to divert off-course when the need arises. ‘Wondering’; that uncertainty and curiosity essential in art-making, often works hand-in-hand with our wandering, prompted by the mystery and possibility of drifting into the unknown.

And that is precisely where we end up.  If paintings are mirrors, they are many-sided.  These works reflect back personal histories, dreams, lush landscapes and mythological otherworlds.  Through their various processes, the artists have created worlds that resist being fixed: in MacKenzie’s energetic, tactile brushstrokes; in Paton’s shifting planes of kaleidoscopic colour; and in Simpson’s unearthly, numinous realms.