EXHIBITION CELEBRATION | Simeon Ayres: A Cartography of the Heart country… a courtship of belonging

Join Benalla Art Gallery and the artist Simeon Ayres for the official celebration of his new exhibition A Cartography of the Heart country… a courtship of belonging.
Simeon Ayres’ practice is defined by landscapes that are aerial, map-like in
perspective, while also encompassing more traditional and pictorial depictions. His work is an attempt to understand the animate world — a world that he sees as both alive and intelligent. He looks for the landscape’s hidden voice, its language, its liminality and its magic.

Of the works, Simeon says, “I walk, I listen, and observe. I feel into the country,
its colours, sounds and shapes, its hidden pathways, and secret places. I like to strip back the country of its man-made additions, and speculate as to how it would be before we arrived. I don’t use drones or satellites and very little outside mapping. I prefer to walk, to enter the country with the reverence that it asks. I have yet to find a bottom to the work I wish to make. How to illustrate time? How to tell the story of the way a river snakes across a valley floor over a hundred thousand years? There is so much in this world, so much grace still present in the land itself.”

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Numbers are strictly limited.

Image: Simeon AYRES
Storm Country, the Source of the Sevens Creek [detail] 2024
ink and watercolour on paper