Paintings as Installation by local artist Sheryl O'Gorman
Curated by Maree Saunders

Presented alongside of landscape paintings by 5 women artists selected from the Whangarei Art Museum Collection.

Sheryl O'Gorman lives and works in the presence of the spectacular landscape that is Mt Manaia and the Whangarei Heads and it is the sublime scale of this landscape that infuses her work and sensibility. Her concerns are with the viewer's presence in the space that we stand in whether it be in the physical landscape or the space created in the gallery between her artworks where the viewer stands.

These are not landscape paintings in the traditional sense: abstract canvases are presented in muted veiled tones and surfaces that echo a towering landscape that is often shrouded in mist and ever changing light, layers of paint trickle down some canvases bringing to mind cascading water and the marks left as the water recedes.

O'Gorman's series of large canvases are presented in a space defined also by large black reflective minimalist panels that echo and reflect the space they oppose. The artist presenting the viewer back to themselves within the space created within these installations of abstract paintings and minimalist black panels.

O'Gorman also presents within the exhibition a number of series consisting of small canvases and panels in which the viewer's presence looms large against the scale of these intimate works.

By demonstrating different planes within the space, I hope to draw attention to the space itself, and the viewer who inhabits it. - Sheryl O'Gorman, 2008

Exhibited along side O'Gorman's works are a small selection of traditional landscape paintings by five women artists painting in the Twentieth Century from the Whangarei Art Museum Collection.

Artists include: Sheryl O'Gorman and Servilla Bede Bourdõt, Sarah McBeath, Doris Lusk, Freda Simmonds and Margaret Stoddard.