Sue Lovegrove: Meltwater
This series of paintings is based on my recent research trip to Iceland last year when I was able to crawl around, get up close to, listen to and gaze down on several different glaciers. The experience was both mesmerising and compelling. The sheer beauty of the surface with its wrinkled sculpted skin, the scale of the ice rivers plummeting and cascading down from 2,000 metres to sea level in a space of just a few kilometres and the overwhelming sense of vulnerability and fragility against the background knowledge that 80% of Europe’s glaciers will be extinct by the end of the century. Due to irreversible human induced global warming the temperature in the arctic is rising faster than anywhere else in the world and as a consequence the Arctic ice is melting at a rapid and alarming rate.
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.
In 2020, Sue was awarded the Elaine Bermingham National Watercolour Prize for Landscape and in 2018 she received an Australia Council Grant to publish The Voice of Water, with Tasmanian poet Adrienne Eberhard. Sue has undertaken numerous residencies including an Australian Antarctic Division Arts Fellowship in 2003 to visit Antarctica and Macquarie Island and in 2006 an Arts Tasmania Wilderness residency to spend 2 months on Maatsuyker Island. In 2015 she studied Persian miniature painting in London.
Sue has held over 30 solo exhibitions throughout Australia and her work is held in numerous private and public collections including: the National Gallery of Australia, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, University of Canberra and the Macquarie Bank to name a few. Sue lives and works in lutruwita/Tasmania.