Join us with artist Mollie Rice for the opening of her solo exhibition Wavelengths at Scratch Art Space, Wednesday 3 July from 6 - 8pm.
With an interest in place and experience, Mollie Rice’s drawing practice is grounded in the personal, and informed by explorations of the internal and external in the rich legacy of Australian landscape drawing and painting.
Sound is significant to the artist. The language and philosophy of sound has been a useful way for them to think about, interpret, and navigate life. It is sound that Mollie initially attends to on site. Focusing on the critical practice of listening, where there is only ‘now’, she makes a blind continuous line drawing (a score) of what she hears. The initial work – her field notes – are important as she begins a new body of work. Afterwards, in the studio, she uses the motifs revealed in the field notes to imagine, remember, process, play, translate, and time travel, evoking a sense of something perpetually solidifying and dissolving.
The drawings in Wavelengths began with a score made in a campground in a small village on the south coast of New South Wales in Australia. It is here that the artist and her family, for many years, have spent their summer holidays. They both know and don’t know this place through the practice of revisiting. Coming here to re-set and replenish. Re-visiting here helps her see clearly the gentle and sometimes momentous shifts and transformations in herself and family, echoing those continuously happening in the physical landscape itself.
Since completing her MFA in 2018, Mollie Rice has exhibited regularly in both regional and metro Gallery group shows including Sentient Visibility (2018) at Grace Cossington Smith Gallery and Occupied (2020) at the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre, Katoomba. The artist has also been a finalist in the Jacaranda Drawing Prize (2018), Hazelhurst Art on Paper prize (2019) and Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing (2020).