By Michael Doran
A new exhibition, The Secrets Shadows Keep, featuring the work of Healesville artist Amanda Ruck, has opened at Yering Station Art Gallery. The exhibition is running until 7 January and gallery curator, Dr Ewen Jarvis said the work highlight the artist’s affinity with skyscapes.
“In this exhibition Amanda Ruck asks us to incline our heads upward and to participate more fully in the ever shifting element of air,” he said. “Surveying paintings that span two decades of creative endeavour, we encounter many works that have apparently emerged from within the realist, landscape tradition.”
“Amanda’s line of sight however is forever tempted skyward, thus diminishing the presence of land and enhancing the lure of the sky, effecting a subtle change of perspective. Our thinking shifts from an engagement with the solid certainties and rigid laws of the material world, toward an uplifting sense of the dynamic, responsive and inherently mutable facets of the freer element of air.
“Something else however strikes us about Ruck’s provoking expanses and that is their arresting, and altogether pregnant atmosphere of unusual stillness.
“They challenge us to explore our own vast interior skies, and to take off over open landscapes full of mysterious promise. Ruck’s images masterfully recreate an unstable element, they remain open, elusive and full of imaginative power.”
Amanda Ruck graduated from the Canberra School of Art in 1988 with a Bachelor of Art, Visual, in printmaking and painting, after which she moved to Melbourne, and in 1998 her love of landscapes and skyscapes drew her out to the Yarra Valley.
She has held eighteen solo exhibitions and been involved in over twenty group exhibitions both nationally and internationally.
