Pretty and tactile works created with amazing technique

Catherine Woo is a Tasmanian-based artist who has built a reputation for visually stunning two-dimensional works employing unconventional materials and techniques. The uniting thread in her oeuvre is the idea of how she reacts to different environments and she, like a medium, recreates the "body" of this environment through materials that have included silica, mica, metal and mineral powders, carbon, ash, glass, clay and rust. These "bodies of environment" are like aerial slabs with no clear orientation or perspective and may be read as a micro or macro view – a grain of sand or a holistic vast image of the universe.

In this, her first solo exhibition in Canberra, Woo draws inspiration from her recent visit to central Australia. She writes in her artist’s statement, “Recently I returned to central Australia, a place that has a depth and grandeur difficult to put into words … It is vast and complex, often almost silent, yet full of energy. The moonless, night sky is so full of star light there is no true black … In these works the alliance with nature is still crucial, but I have felt compelled to make the human element more present, representing a more symbiotic interrelationship.”

It is difficult to get over the first visual impact of the sheer "prettiness" of Woo’s surfaces. They are immensely tactile pieces with liquid pigment flows, ridges and spreading patterns of vibrant sparkling colours and glimmering planes of paint. The fact that she has painted them on aluminium panels heightens the sensation as the surfaces radiate in their shining brilliance.

A piece like Red Earth II consists of mineral sands, glass, pigment, metal powders and acrylic which is applied to a square aluminium plate measuring 120 by 120 centimetres. It is impossible to view such a piece relating to Australia’s red centre without thinking about Aboriginal art.

Woo has resisted the temptation to create some sort of a non-Indigenous pastiche of an Indigenous painting, but at the same time parallels are inevitable. In Indigenous art the essence of the land is recreated; in Woo’s paintings we have a lovely treatment of surface impressions.

Another one of her paintings, Luft (I assume the connotation is with its German meaning of air, space or breath) combines with an acrylic binder mica, kaolin, calcium carbonate and pigment to create an effective and intriguing surface. As a personal aesthetic preference, I am drawn to her more chromatically subdued pieces, such as this one, rather than those of more polychrome exuberance.

Woo can be thought of as an artist who believes in William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence, where in his immortal opening lines he encapsulates a whole philosophy of being. “To see a world in a grain of sand /And a heaven in a wild flower, /Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, /And eternity in an hour.”

She has devised an amazing technique that blurs the dimensions of scale, time and space, but is as yet to refine a structure of ideas that will give coherence to her venture.