"To protect the forest is to protect our dreams."
— FernGully: The Last Rainforest, 1992
Serving as a topography of place and feminine imagination, En Plein Air invites viewers into the inner landscapes of six artists whose practices are imbued with the Northern Rivers — a province that has become, quietly one of the most compelling creative destinations of the moment. Informed with a sense of curiosity, each work is a marker in time: of a region, a season, a way of seeing that insists on the beauty latent in the wilds.
Butterwood Ranch began as an exploration of place. Not place as backdrop but as an intimate portrait of being. An inquiry of how a landscape seeps into you, how it becomes home, and how a sense of place becomes the deepest grammar of an aesthetic — shaping routines, practices, sensibilities, palette. And so it feels fitting that our inaugural winter show should open on these particular poetics of space.
I have never subscribed to the rustic tropes of country living. Particularly here, in this subtropical woodland that inspired the cult 90s film FernGully — there is a whimsicality that moves through the cultural pulse of the Northern Rivers. What makes this region's eclecticism distinctive is the modern sophistication that underpins it. The talent residing here, an intimate milieu across fashion, design, art and music, is operating at a standard of global excellence. Laurel Canyon, New Mexico, St Ives, Provence — all produced geographically inflected bodies of work that still inspire generations today. The Northern Rivers is finding its own place in that lineage.
The title of this exhibition 'En Plein Air' borrows from a painting term that means in the open air. It is a nod to how living in such close proximity with landscape makes it impossible to separate the work from the world it is made within. It cannot be escaped. It is not a technique but a way of being.
Leading a new guard of regional savoir-faire are a number of local creative women exploring the liminal space between the domestic and the untamed. Working across abstraction, surrealism and impressionist painting, they move in the tradition of artists for whom feeling precedes form, where the interior world and the exterior landscape become inseparable. In the long history of the pastoral, landscape has most often been rendered through the male gaze, a countryside seen from the outside. Our exhibiting artists Katia Oblak, Jessica D'Abadie, Romy Bennie, Hélène König and Elle-Louise Burguez are changing this. They are distilling place into a feminine ethereality that feels akin to Agnes Martin's connection to nature's essence — that quality of feeling the things behind things. It celebrates nature's spontaneity and its reflective qualities to mirror our own wild interiority. One that remembers staring at clouds and seeing flying horses, dancing through fields, blowing petals into the wind. That glimmer of a magical creature half-glimpsed in the woods.
An exception to the all-star female line-up is our husband-and-wife duo Pazzalotti, Mitch and Rebekah Parry, whose clay work exudes a harmony between the masculine and feminine that feels exuberant and generous. It is this convivial, left-of-field sensibility — tactile, bold, creamy-glazed and bright — that feels like an enchanting new dialogue with the land.
"To throw herself back on pastoral dreams, all the more naïve and childlike for the brutality and darkness triumphant in the world of activity." Wrote 19th-century literary great George Sand, whose most beloved work was born of an intimate connection to the provincial and pastoral — and who understood something these artists understand too: that the turn toward the domestic, the dreaming, the organic and the quietly wild is not an escape. It is a bold and audacious creative play.
En Plein Air is a love letter to this landscape and a gateway to reverie — installed as a lived-in gallery within the Butterwood Ranch guesthouse. It is the antithesis of the white-cube: an offering of permission, to quote Sand's words, in a world of activity, to be still and languish in the aura of the work; beside beds and books, in rooms where daylight moves slowly across timber walls, sometimes viewed with a warm cup of tea. It is a place where you might stay a while, and find your way back to your own intimate dreams.
Words
Olivia Drake
