Nicola Gower Wallis: A Window Illuminated

"I have never considered myself a student of realism. I've never quite reached the pinnacle of drawing a really good horse, or managed to draw a convincingly straight line. And perhaps it was then, in commiserating with a wonky looking cat, that my attachment to medieval art really began.

It's only been recently, so preoccupied with attempting to express my own stories within a single frame, that I have truly come to appreciate the forms and techniques behind those ancient paintings and tapestries. How succinctly they express a narrative, so stylishly removed from the constraints of the true and factual.

Spend enough time in any place and the landscape itself begins to form an odd little patchwork of memory and myth: currawongs drunk on spoiled apples at Koonya, the vile tyranny of a neighbour's marauding chicken, the Dunalley Fish Market on a Saturday afternoon, the madness of the Bream Creek show.

These works are an embrace of the wonky, the slight wrongness that comes from a story being retold too many times, the fuzziness of shapes seen at dusk in the wintertime, all washed out by the window of a house glowing brightly."

Nicola Gower Wallis, 2023

Nicola Gower Wallis’ paintings recast the habitual as the exceptional, and the familiar as the fantastic. Her vibrant narrative works are based in small stories, be they folkloric passed down by generations, her daily musings or her nightly dreams; they carry the magic of the unverifiable, the rumoured and the imagined. One is reminded of the centuries of illustrative embellishment captured in miniature by the master painters of India. Much like these painters incorporated the tropes of stylised European backgrounds and exquisite Persian patterning into luminous depictions of their multi-faceted lore, Gower Wallis embellishes her memories with the floral tessellations of the Millefleur tapestries of the early Renaissance. She is inquisitive of every detail. 

Gower Wallis begins simply: she describes the familiarity of her garden, walking up the paddock every morning and back every evening; she describes the chequered and changing greens of the paddocks surrounding hers. And she is soon enraptured by these events. The painter’s memories flood with mille-fleur. A thousand flowers blanket the fields and paddocks that Gower Wallis re-walks in her dreamscapes; the mundane is transformed into the meditative and elevated to the mythological.

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