Time Travellers
David Spooner, Sherry Black, Shaun Weston
This exhibition maps how three artists travel through time. David Spooner exhibits daily drawings to reveal an entire year over 366 pages. Sherry Black marvels at the oddities of the past, exposing fatal practices of bygone fashions. Shaun Weston contemplates our individual timelines and how we commemorate key life events with flowers.
David Spooner
Since 2017, David Spooner has set himself an annual drawing challenge, beginning with a drawing a week and since 2018 completing a drawing a day, using permanent markers and the same size page. In 2020, he centred these drawings around obscure commemorative days that are celebrated in different places around the world such as ‘I Forget Day’ or ‘Water A Flower Day’.
Spooner notes that “the reason for the frequency of the drawings is to keep me making artwork, engage with my online community and by extension the art community”.
Sheryn (Sherry) Black
Many of Sherry Black’s images come from written accounts of fashion adopted by women, each work on board representing a different and dangerous fashion from the past. Significant works include the oil painting ‘Grandmother Clock,’ a Victorian setting showing Scheele’s Green on the wall (a paint containing lethal arsenic and copper components) along with flowers and Staffordshire poodles, which have secret meanings. In ‘The Language of Pears,’ the pears are symbolic of both women and fidelity. Whist the flowers are pretty, the particular species depicted has a smell that bees and butterflies find offensive.
Black states, “sometimes I use allegories for painful subjects and traditional painting symbols to add meaning”.
“Since childhood, I’ve loved to paint and draw. I wanted to be an artist when I grew up. Now I help children to learn numeracy and literacy skills using drawings and I still paint.”
“I have facilitated several NGO art groups and exhibited my work with group members. I’ve seen how creativity changes lives and offers peaceful interludes. Though I am mostly self- taught, I took some lessons from Nick Mullens, who could paint a realistic portrait in a drop of water within a painting. Indian ink on art board is a recent interest.”
Shaun Weston
Since 2018 Shaun Weston has experimented with free-flowing inks to develop a practice heavily reliant on both intentional and accidental lines. Several groupings of these ‘Drip Drawings’ are included in Time Travellers. One such example is ‘Four Piece Suit,’ a collection of some of these earliest drawings with images sourced from found family photos. Weston notes, “such works are representative of the masculinity I saw played out in my childhood, something which often felt alien to me”. But such works also evoke a sense of nostalgia, perhaps heightened by the used of watered-down cyan ink, as if looking back at a faded memory.
Informed by personal narrative, Weston focuses primarily on two subjects – people and flowers. Over the course of the last year, he has completed a series of flower studies, with some of the bunches depicted marking key life events for those close to him, such as weddings, anniversaries and funerals. For ‘Flora’ he observed a vase of Australian native flowers dry out in the studio. “With the passing of time, I noticed the flowers invert and the leaves droop - properties which seem in keeping with the drips that run down the page. Documenting this reminds me of my own impermanence.”