Pocketful Of Change - Pulp Paintings, Collage & Installation

 Extracts from essay by Carol Schwarzman 2010

Pocketful of change Lesa Hepburn Friday 16 April 2010 to Saturday 08 May 2010
Doggett Street Studio 85 Doggett Street, Newstead, Q 4006

Lesa Hepburn’s new exhibition at Doggett Street Studio confronts the effects of Lesa’s separation from her home in Malaysia and her immersion in a strange, new Australian culture at the age of 7. Many years later in this exhibition, she responds to a resurfacing of her Malaysian experiences and the memories triggered by the Malaysian stamps collected from letters to and from her family. 

Lesa has brought together new works in collage, exploring paper’s expressive potential as the vehicle for abstract thought via text and image, as well as formal, physical substance. She assembles, cuts and pastes pictures; she makes paper pulp from fabric, plants, recycled paper and other organic matter. Pulp is mixed, shaped, moulded or employed as line and colour. Existing across the two- and three-dimensional media of drawing, painting and sculpture, incorporating signage, poetry and symbol; imagery and text function as compositional elements and as prompts for reverie and delight. By all these means, Hepburn’s art seeks an equipoise of the material and the sublime.

Lesa collects artifacts and specimens, and assembles, joins and fabricates with them as structural and symbolic elements. She will reach for a material and use it directly to evoke an archetype. For example, in Fishing for Guppies, she has exposed the top layer of wet paper pulp to the weather, capturing the unorthodox, wabi sabi effect of chance marks left behind by raindrops. Her imagery, as well, plays with primary psychological imprints we share and associate with land, sky and water — repeated patterns of spirals, circles, horizon lines, seed pods and spheres. 

Doggett Street Studio is open from 10am to 4pm Wednesday to Saturday. For more information about the Doggett Street Studio call (07) 3252 9292 or email info@doggett.com.au.

Lesa Hepburn’s artwork can also be seen on-line at www.doggett.com.au or on Lesa’s own website: www.lesahepburn.com. Lesa can be contacted for more information on her work, commissions and workshops by:

Ph/fax: 3203 6221
Em: lesa@lesahepburn.com
Web: http://www.lesahepburn.com