Bronia Iwanczak: The artist as mental ecologist

Heather Ellyards valued objects are static, symbolic, juxtaposed rather than flowing. Ellyard asserts that she wants to speak the lyrics and sorrows of our time. As she has said, I am interested in the glimpses, held, remembered, aligned inclusively&I am interested in awareness and how to acknowledge it within a visual framework. It may be that Ellyards vision of the periodical table is a bridge: between life made up of many little things and the one big thing toward which we all yearn. She leans more to wisdom art than to the mimetic or the sublime. Ellyards art is incorrigibly plural, and sustainedly committed to the broadest kind of human vision. Textual references include the works of D.W. Winnicott, Jacob Rosenberg, Arthur Koestler, Basquiat, Brett Whiteley and Primo Levi amongst others.

The symbolic and perpetual possibilities of pattern are constantly under interrogation in the work of Sara Hughes as she is compelled to inhabit the capricious edges of what painting might be. Being a child of her times, Hughes was part of the sticker generation who adorned the unsuspecting surfaces of schoolbooks, bedroom walls, wardrobes, mirrors and fridges. She applies similar processes to her work as a means of mimicking the act of making something ones own and thus reinforces the claiming and transforming of spatial environments. This article follows Hughes practice through the visitation of childhood moments while simultaneously offering a platform for new conversations about spatial interplays and the shifting dialogues between surface and form, codes and perception and graphic modes and painterly references. Some of Hughes' primary influences include William Gibsons 2003 novel Pattern Recognition and the works of Yayoi Kusama, Takashi Murakami, Yoshinori Tanaka and Sergio Leone.

Yvonne Boag is a traveller, a wanderer and keen surveyor of her surroundings. Her concerns of language and place traverse a myriad of media such as paintings, prints and drawings in a career spanning three decades. As Boag commented in 1989 With every new work I start, it seems I am always at a beginning. Each work is an attempt to hold on to time. To make marks of that time, which will trace a pattern through my life& Through this text Donna Brett looks at Boags journeys to places such as Korea, Paris and the Lockhart River and her use of iconography and dense layering as a means of mapping her interaction with places, journeys and people. Some artistic influences here discussed include the works of Roger Hilton, William Scott, Ben Nicholson, Patrick Heron and Avis Newman. The Lockhart River, Urban Landscape and Conversations series are referred to in considerable detail.