Sue Lovegrove: The Invisible Lake

 When Lake Pedder was flooded in 1972 to create a hydro dam, it was a devastating loss to both the environment and to the community of conservation minded people who value and care deeply for our natural heritage. 50 years on, the lake is still very present in our imaginations. The extraordinary thing is that the lake still exists lying intact beneath the current water level, the pinkish/white quartz sandy beaches and the winding Serpentine River are still there, just as they were before.

For me, the idea of an invisible lake lying hidden beneath the surface of the water is both a compelling and contradictory image to imagine. It is a body of water that is also concealed by water. In the act of concealing something, its presence becomes so much more profound and significant. In this way Lake Pedder continues to exist in our memory, at the edge of perception and at the same time tantalisingly present as an invisible lake.

These paintings are intended as a meditation on the idea of transience embodied in the lake. I hope to draw the viewer into an intimate and poetic contemplation of the elemental qualities of place: the shifting light on water, the stillness in the shadows at the edge, the sounds of life and the enigmatic, mysterious and abstract worlds both above and below the surface of the water. These paintings are an expression of our collective grief and loss for a lake and hopefully provide a space for memory to rest. In the abstraction of movement within and beneath, time collapses.

Floating mountains                 

Waiting

Sue Lovegrove’s works reflect her close relationship to the natural environment. Her paintings explore the interplay between surface and depth, layers building opacity in rich blue and deep ochre plunge the eye downwards before it is caught in an instant and returned to the rippling surface by fine slivers of sunlight. Fleeting renderings dance across the ageless deep of oceans and lakes. Through diving and rising again and again comes the realisation that these landscapes are as physical as psychological, as real as invoked.

Lovegrove’s highly detailed and exquisitely fine brushwork captures the shifting of the wind as it weaves patterns across the surfaces of wetlands, rivers and oceans. The works map the world’s most fragile wilderness, beginning in Tasmania and travelling southward. The journey into the unknown is palpable as if the weather itself travels through the artist’s hand; a solitary calm cast over by the temporary turbulence of interacting forces.

Born in Adelaide in 1962, Lovegrove completed a Bachelor and PhD at the ANU in Canberra.  In 2020, Sue was the winner of the the 2020 Elaine Bermingham National Watercolour Prize in Landscape Painting with her work ‘The Voice of Water, (No 9.24).  She lives and works in Tasmania.

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