Camie Lyons - Undulation - 2023 - Scott Livesey Galleries

UNDULATIONS

Camie Lyons has spent many hours exploring the beaches and tracks of the South Coast in New South Wales. As she walks, she picks up vines, rope or fallen branches and twists them into forms intuitively, letting her hands do the work. Lyons calls this practice “impromptu making”, a term that reflects her former career as a dancer. As improvisation, her process uses walking and muscle memory to begin a work that will later influence her compositions. When she returns to her studio, she works these forms and begins binding larger vines together in new compositions. She refers to these first unselfconscious forms as ‘drawing in space’ and uses them as her making ‘devices’.

Lyons practice is largely processed base, developing from the point where the artist’s body meets the landscape. This position encourages a response that is both physical and observational, embodied and unrehearsed. But the influence becomes particularly noticeable now that Lyons has found herself in a new landscape, but which is becoming increasingly familiar. Here, the ocean bookends her days, which begin and end with either a walk along the tideline or a swim. “The water is a kind of punctuation; without it my day feels incomplete, like a sentence with no ending.”

Completeness, like a circle or a daily swim in the ocean, expands within Lyons’ language. You can see the curve and repetition of the saltlines, tidelines, and treelines in her sinewy shapes, in both her sculptures and paintings. It’s a language that reveals itself in simple palettes and forms, abstracted of course, and often cast in bronze.

“Being in the landscape has really affected my work, everything has loosened and has this beautiful movement,” she explains. In this way, her work represents a connection to the landscape as an experience of the ephemeral made permanent.

The expansiveness of the coastal landscape is evident in the rhythm of Lyons latest body of work, which holds a careful balance between release and tension. In the work exhibited for Undulation, you can feel this shift in her practice as one of new rhythms. For example, Portal to Self (2023) suggests the repeating waves that reach the shore and recede. Others rhizomatic and twisting, curve outwards from themselves like an eternal unravelling. Time is both momentary and infinite here. As Lyons says, “The days lose their sense of time when I am here, the vast landscapes providing such a different energy from that of the city.”

This felt experience of being in the world doesn’t focus on the external. “It’s about capturing all those things that are internal – the sinew, the muscle, the memory. In a way I’m creating a kind of umbilical where we are all attached to nature and our past and our history. It’s the life threads that bind us, that keep us here,” Lyons says. Walking and making, in Lyons hands, becomes an inner reflection on connection through abstracted landscapes that hold us steady.

UNDULATION , 2023

bronze

62 x 75 x 44 cm

KELP

ink, charcoal and acrylic on paper

76 x 56 cm - each

FLOW STATE , 2023

bronze 73 x 71 x 36 cm

NIGHT TIDES , 2023

bronze

64 x 60 x 48 cm

167.5 x 244 cm overall - diptych

LANDSCAPE DETAILS 1 , 2023

LANDSCAPE DETAILS 2 , 2023

ink, charcoal, pencil and acrylic on paper

76 x 56 cm - each

IN THE PULSE OF IT ALL , 2023

bronze 65 x 71 x 31 cm

SUN BLEACHED AND UNBODIED ,2023

PORTAL TO SELF , 2023

bronze

58 x 105 x 48 cm

VANISHING BOY , 2023

charcoal on paper

WASHED OUT BALLY BOY , 2023

ink, charcoal and acrylic on paper

76 x 56 cm - each

EXPANSIVE THINKING , 2023

bronze

48 x 71 x 56 cm

KNOT BASKET , 2023

ink, charcoal and acrylic on paper

76 x 56 cm - each

BEYOND THE SELF , 2023

bronze 111 x 125 x 48 cm

TUMBLING GENTLY ,

FLOTSAM 3 , 2023

BALLY BOY , 2023

FLOTSAM , 2023

charcoal and ink on paper

76 x 56 cm - each

INCOMPARABLE SPARKS , 2023

bronze 51 x 55 x 31 cm

EDUCATION

2005 Master of Fine Art (Sculpture), College of Fine Arts, Paddington

1999 Bachelor of Fine Art (Sculpture) RMIT

2000 Concrete Course, Chalmers University, Gothenburg, Sweden

2001 Studied Butoh and Laban Movement Techniques, Soros Foundation, Bulgaria

2003 Granite Course, Sten Academy & Chalmers University, Sweden

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2023 ‘Undulation’ Scott Livesey Galleries, Melbourne

2022 ‘Bush Calligraphy’ close observations and things of wonder, Australian Galleries, Sydney

2020 ‘A Physical Response’ Australian Galleries, Sydney

2020 ‘Making Meaning’ Scott Livesey Galleries, Melbourne

2019 ‘A Physical Response’ Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, NSW

2019 ‘The Humming Space’ Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane

2018 ‘Untethered’, Scott Livesey Galleries, Melbourne

2017 ‘Out on a limb’, Olsen Gallery, Sydney

2016 ‘Spirit Recovered’, Scott Livesey Galleries, Melbourne

2016 ‘Tenderness and Tenacity’, Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong

2015 ‘Rural Romance’, Olsen Irwin Gallery, Sydney

2015 ‘Solid Drawing’, Scott Livesey Galleries, Melbourne

2014 ‘Finding Beauty’, Olsen Irwin Gallery, Sydney

2012 ‘Just This Moment’, Australian Arts Projects, Singapore

2011 ‘Wallflower (entering space)’, Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney

2009 ‘In the Zone’, Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong

2009 ‘Lyrical’, Richard Martin Art, Sydney

2008 ‘Falling’, Richard Martin Art, Sydney

2007 ‘Ionosphere’, Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong

2005 ‘Casting Into Space’, Kudos Gallery, Sydney

2005 ‘Ned & Bob’, Hungerford & Edmunds Architects, Sydney

2004 ‘e:Motion’, Spence & Lyda, Sydney

2000 ‘Earth Cycle’, Gothenburg City Gardens, Sweden (on permanent display)

2000 ‘Moebius Dance’, Sherman Galleries windowbox, Sydney

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2023 Sculpture in the Gardens, Woollongong Botantic Gardens, NSW

2022 Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi, 2022

2022 The Lake Art Prize, Museum Arts and Culture, Yapang, NSW

2022 Sculpture at the CoalLoader site, North Sydney Art Prize, NSW

2020 Sculpture at Scenic World 2020, Blue Mountains, NSW (postponed 2021)

2020 Ravenswood Australian Womens Art Prize, Ravenswood, Gordon, NSW

2021 Sculpture Other, Katoomba Cultural Center, Blue Mountains, NSW

2020 Sydney Contemporary with Australian Galleries

2019 Sydney Contemporary Works on Paper, Australian Galleries, NSW

2017 ‘At Bull Bay’, Delmar Gallery, Hobart

2015 ‘At Bull Bay’, Delmar Gallery, Hobart

2014 ‘Singapore Affordable Art Fair’ with Australasian Art Projects, Singapore

2013 ‘Loaded: The Ned Kelly Exhibition’, Australian High Commission, Singapore

2013 ‘Grounded’, Australian High Commission, Australian Arts Projects Singapore

2013 Sydney Contemporary Art Fair with Olsen Irwin Gallery, Sydney

2012 Melbourne Art Fair with Tim Olsen Gallery, Melbourne

2011 ‘Wattle: A Survey of Contemporary Australian Art’, Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong

2010 Dobell Drawing Prize, Art Gallery of New South Wales

2010 ‘Sculpture 2010’ Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney

2010 ‘Signal 8’ Summer Show, Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong

2010 Melbourne Art Fair with Tim Olsen Gallery

2009 Hong Kong Art Fair with Cat Street Gallery

2009 Hong Kong Art Walk, Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong

2008 ‘Signal 8’, Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong

2006 ‘Friend Lyons Petrie’, Stella Downer Fine Art, Sydney

2006 ‘Sculpture 2006’, Global Gallery, Sydney

2004 ‘Push Hard Cut Deep’, Avja Yards, Sweden

2003 ‘Granite Plays’, Hunnebostrand, Sweden

GRANTS, AWARDS, RESIDENCIES

2023 Highly Commended, Sculptures in the Gardens, Wollongong

2021 Winner of the Sculpture at Scenic World Art Prize, 2021

2021 Winner of the Blue Mountains Cultural Center Award

2020 Highly Commended, Live in Art Invitational Art Prize, Zobon Group, Sydney/China

2020 Artist Residency at BigCi Australia, funded by Scenic World Blue Mountains

2020 Finalist for SXS 2020, Bondi (postponed to 2022)

2020 Received the Umbi Gumbi Creative Residency, Cuttagee NSW (returned again in 2021)

2018 Hill End Artist Residency, Bathurst Regional Gallery, NSW

2017 Bull Bay Artist in Residency, Bruny Island, Tasmania

2016 ‘Natures Waltz’ Kerry Hotel, 2 large entrance foyer sculptures, Hong Kong

2014 Bull Bay Artist in Residency, Bruny Island, Tasmania

2011 ‘True Project’ sculpture commission for Phuket, Thailand

2009 ‘Many Leaps Towards You’ entrance foyer wall installation, Pullman Hotel

2005 Awarded Research Grant, College of Fine Arts, University of NSW

2004 Guest Artist, Stone Academy Hunnebostrand, Sweden

2003 Artist in Residence (Stone sculpting course), Chalmers University, Sweden

2001 Soros Foundation Scholarship to attend Butoh and Laban Technique, Bulgaria

2000 Winner of the Baron Edson Public Art Commission, Waverly Council, Sydney

2000 Artist in Residence (Concrete course), Chalmers University, Sweden

COLLECTIONS

AMP Capitol, Sydney

Classic. East Melbourne (a development by Cbus / designed by Bates Smart)

Deloitte

Hilton Hotel Sydney

Langham Group Gold Coast

Tiffany and Co, Sydney

Gothenburg City Gardens, Slottskogen

Hoi Ha Wan Marine Reserve, Hong Kong

Kerry Hotel, Hong Kong (Shangri-La Group)

Sydney City Council

Waverley City Council

Public and private collections in Australia, England, Sweden, Hong Kong, Singapore, London, France, Macau, Thailand, Hawaii, New York and Los Angeles.

ISBN | 978-0-6454880-5-0

© copyright 2023

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