Wednesday, June 23, 2010

"Line and Link" - Digital artists challenge the 'way we see'!


Jolanta Nejman, Australian/Polish artist and surface designer. Her passion for creativity has been rich and diverse spanning many decades and countries. Having been a fashion designer, interior designer, set designer, costume designer, television production designer, mixed media artist and involved in many other areas. Over time she has gathered the knowledge of many skills, not all at expert level of course.
As a dabbler, always curious about varied fields and techniques has given Jola the knowledge to combine in her art works some elaborated mixed media. Her inspiration comes from nature, design and society.
The first exhibition in 1992 set the path for exploring shape, texture and colour. The first pieces, a series of framed mirrors, hand shaped, painted and sealed were just a step on a long trip. Phil, her partner is an explorer and amongst his many talents is Industrial Design which helps when Jola's aim is beyond the familiar. With time she embraced his love of computers and they are now an indispensable tool in what they both do.

If you wonder about her creative process, well, it begins with an idea, progresses to gathering references, sketching, drawing, scanning, researching and experimenting. As the days go by the original idea usually evolves, sometimes the art tells her to stop and sometimes it asks for more. Sometimes she gets in a moment and creates without conscious thought but mostly there's a lot of thinking and figuring out how to get just the right texture/colour/balance.
The images reflect, love, loss, thoughts, emotions, the intensity of the new and the fading of the old, the lines, the curves, the ebb and the flow…. but mostly they say that I miss my mother, she was young once and I wasn't even born.

Philip Salmon is a thinker, photographer and industrial designer. His family background is light and engineering and from 14 years old he has had a fascination with light that eventuated in starting entertainment lighting businesses that others took over when his passion for capturing light became a focus. Photography has been a 30 year old passion cemented while studying Industrial Design at Sydney College of the Arts in the late 70's. As a 3 dimensional thinker, lighting, sound, sculptures, architecture and anything really interesting, captivates and nourishes his need for knowledge. Macintosh computers and Photography have combined in his latest work to elaborate the capture of a moment into a statement. He loves doing, making and finds inspiration in his surroundings, be they people, bush or city.
Philip has exhibited in the Central West for almost a decade now. Using photography as a medium of expression to shine a light where our eyes often fail to focus his work is infused with texture, rhythm and pattern. The last exhibition saw him go further in his exploration of printing, from the traditional darkroom he has now progressed fully into this millennium and embraced the digital age. Phil's studio now boasts large format printers that not only print on 61cm rolls of paper but can print on almost any media, including fabric and wood. These tools enable his fertile imagination to produce photographic prints which are complex in structure and tell a story beyond the image.
Line and Link is based on events since 2004 which were pivotal in putting us on a road of inner learning. The interest in how we link together originated because of the immense void left in our hearts when we were deprived of our mothers’ presence. To become orphans, no matter what the age, is to be cast adrift from the familial centre. 
Lines and Link is a dual exhibition of Philip Salmon and Jolanta Nejman.
The theme of the past shaping the future, the line of evolution, lines that unite are sometimes the lines that divide us, the networks we live with, the links that we make and the links that bind us. Lines and Link explores different printing media specifically focused on wood.
All these stem from the lines, links, webs between us, seen and unseen. The link between a mother and her child, the link of our foremothers, the ability to be in a crowd and feel alone… 

So after months of preparation, welcome to our exhibition, hope you enjoy it.

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