“In all things of nature there is something of the marvellous.”

Aristotle

This exhibition’s title: “From Little Creeks to Wide Open Spaces” is inspired by Sue Smalkowski’s many road trips, exploring and marvelling at the vast Australian landscape. In every varied aspect, from the grandiose mountain ranges, golden grassy fields, or the gentle trickle of water through a sun-dappled creek bed, there is an element that encourages discovery and contemplation.

Along the way, Sue gathers impressions through sketching in watercolour and gouache, quick studies that capture fleeting moments of colour, light and form. Photographs taken from the passenger seat of the car also serve as visual notes, reminders of the contours and atmospheres of place. Back in the studio, these fragments are reimagined in larger abstract oil paintings — works that seek to translate not just the physical terrain, but the memory and feeling of being immersed in it.

To capture this wonder, Sue sketches using watercolour and gouache and this, along with photos taken of her surrounds from the car passenger seat, form her visual notes and recollection of place. Once back home and in her studio, Sue works up these memory  prompts into larger, conceptual and intricately layered, oil paintings.

The paintings in this exhibition, along with her hand painted ceramics, capture, in abstract, the wide, open spaces and the panorama of unfolding ranges.  In contrast to this depiction of magnificence and sense of immensity, is a representation of a more secluded immersion in, and entanglement with, nature. Camping, contemplating, sketching the reeds and mottled gums hugging a river or being embraced by warm rocky outcrops in the bush, listening to bush talk; its birdsong, the  leaves rustled by gentle breezes or smelling the creek mist as it rises at dusk and being wrapped by an ethereal damp, prompts Sue to consider that, as Aristotle noted, there is, indeed, in “all things of nature, something of the marvellous.”

These paintings are Sue’s conversation with the land, moments revealed in a complexity of colour, lines, lights and shadows, suggesting movement and vitality in some, and peace and calmness in others. Nature is a tapestry, woven with wonders, inviting observation, immersion and reflection.

- Dr Robyn Morris