This exhibition will present a series of works which respond to current environmental challenges. Phil Page’s work examines the historical shaping of a city by disaster, Susan Chancellor aims to give the viewer a sense of the new reality that we inhabit after the summer of bushfires and Susan Banks explores the botanical survivors of drought in the urban environment.

Jointly curated, the show will present a series of works which respond to current environmental challenges. These intensely personal works speak of the recent past viewed through the eyes of three experienced visual artists. The word ‘impacted’ has been much used recently as if there had been some sort of sudden blow to life, and this may be the case for many, but for us, the sense of the changes this season has brought, is much more diffuse and sustained. Phil Page’s work examines the historical shaping of a city by disaster, Susan Chancellor aims to give the viewer a sense of the new reality that we inhabit after the summer of bushfires and Susan Banks explores the botanical survivors of drought in the urban environment.

Susan Chancellor will focus on her experience of the long hot summer of bush fires on the Far South Coast of NSW. The work will be a wall-based series of paintings and/or monotypes reflecting her lingering memories of a strange atmospheric light as a metaphoric expression of change in the aftermath.

Phil Page’s urban works are a kind of history painting where the past, present and future are merged as a painterly palimpsest where each layer informs the next. Paintings in this exhibition will explore the historical, environmental and cultural issues that have shaped Venice, and those that lie ahead. Two large works and several smaller paintings will be thematically linked around these environmental and cultural challenges.

Susan Banks celebrates the resilience and survival of weeds, such as couch grass, vinca and pennywort that have thrived in the drought on the urban nature strip. Their ability to adapt, to recover rapidly and their prolific nature makes them a weed in good times but desirable in bad. The work will include drawings, paintings and the living plants themselves.