“MORPHOGENESIS”
An exhibition of new paintings by Richard Hook.
15th - 30th July FCA Gallery
Opening Wednesday 21st July 12:30pm - All welcome
Lighter than air…the bones of a wing…aerial architecture…skeletons of air and water…fissures in the rock…’patterns that connect’…wing, tower, aerial, cantilever, branch, bough, stem, arm, spine…
The analogies between nature and design are fundamental and provide us with a language of forms and an aesthetic of economy and fitness to task. My task has been to find a new territory where nature and invention meet on equal terms.
This series of paintings – Morphogenesis – takes the familiar subjects of body and landscape and condenses them into webs of energy and growth, elaborated as living systems that layer and merge the organic and the architectural into integrated structures: ecologies of a sort. They might be skeletal, vascular, engineering or foliate; the colours are earth, water, branch and blood. Below the surface, blood circulates, bones support and bend, water ebbs and flows, rock fractures and branches push.
Neither of literal landscapes nor figures, these paintings speculate on the inter-connection between natural and cultural forms, our habit of seeing one thing in terms of another, specifically through structural analogies. Structures are mobilised as a way of depicting relationships and processes in nature over time – rhythms, flow, growth, tension, the life of systems and the relation of all organisms to their eco-systems. The paintings attempt to dramatise the process in which our powerful feeling for physical and biological forms in nature can generate new, empathetic cultural forms in art, design and architecture.
I don’t wish these comments to be read as a program. The work here marries speculation and intuition in ways that may not be entirely rational. In the first place, I hope they can be enjoyed for their visual pleasures.
Richard Hook
July, 2004
Enquiries regarding purchase of artworks should be forwarded to:
Beth Dray
Administrative Assistant
School of Art & Design
Faculty of Creative Arts
University of Wollongong
PH: 61 2 4221 5853
Fax: 61 2 4221 4127
edray@uow.edu.au
|
|
