28th – 30th October, 2011 The Hempel Hotel 31-35 Craven Hill Gardens
Impressions of a Wind-Up Bird is an exhibition presenting a new series of paintings by emerging artist Tahnee Lonsdale. From Haruki Murakami’s novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Lonsdale highlights the symbiotic relationship between contemporary art and literature. Her creative process has resulted in an exploration of mythologies, and expresses a Kafkaesque sense of oneself lost in a labyrinthine world.
Themes of alienation and melancholy permeate throughout Impressions of a Wind-Up Bird, and Lonsdale demonstrates a remarkable self-reflexive turn in this new series of works. Here, there is a performative and intuitive process of perceiving, translating and developing a visual narrative around metaphysical discourse.
Impressions of a Wind-Up Bird feature figures transmuted from daily life into fiction and hold symbolic meaning for the artist. They appear from one scene or work to the next, and are often discovered amid a layered landscape of color field abstraction. Meanwhile, small traces of thoughts are inscribed – then often erased – upon the surface. These elements all form part of greater narrative thread running throughout Lonsdale’s oeuvre.
What ultimately appears out from the depths of these paintings are characters lost in expansive landscapes, and a sense of the self displaced in a distorted, uncanny world. Drawing parallels with Haruki Murakami’s literature, an awareness of losing oneself behind a veil of ‘the apparent’ pervades Lonsdale’s work, whereby one is at once ‘becoming’ whilst no longer able to recognize oneself from an original sense.
Tahnee Lonsdale is establishing herself a dynamic and creative force, and this exhibition marks an exciting opportunity to view new works by a flourishing artistic talent.
