Sally Gearon

Assistant Editor at Art Guide Australia

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Articles

The process of painting

Mar 25, 2025 | artguide.com.au | Sally Gearon

In 1938, during a low point in his life following divorce and eviction, the English painter Stanley Spencer embarked on his Christ in the Wilderness series, planning to create 40 paintings depicting, “how Christ may have spent each day, the great adventure all by himself with leaves and trees and mud and rabbits and rocks, just as I was having among two chairs, a bed, a fireplace and a table.” He only finished eight paintings, and started a ninth, but created many preparatory sketches,...
Joan Ross and the past imperfect

Mar 18, 2025 | artguide.com.au | Sally Gearon

Joan Ross has long used her multidisciplinary practice—which spans drawing, painting, collage, printmaking, sculpture, video animation and installation—to explore the enduring legacy of colonialism in Australia, and how colonial systems are entrenched in our museums and collections. Vibrant scenes of flora and neon are used to attract a viewer, before quickly revealing a sinister world of Indigenous exploitation and environmental degradation.
Gregory Hodge looks beyond the surface

Feb 26, 2025 | artguide.com.au | Sally Gearon

I get the sense from Gregory Hodge’s latest series of paintings that they have been waiting to emerge for some time. The artist was once synonymous with bold abstraction, his signature gestural strokes exhibiting in galleries across the country and featuring on the cover of Amber Creswell Bell’s Australian Abstract (published by Thames and Hudson Australia in 2023).
The different strokes of Ethel Carrick — Art Guide Australia

Jan 27, 2025 | artguide.com.au | Sally Gearon

Australian galleries have a long love affair with impressionism and post-impressionism. At the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) alone, roughly half of its annual Winter Masterpieces exhibitions over the last decade or so have featured impressionists and post-impressionists—from Pierre Bonnard, Edgar Degas, and Claude Monet to Vincent van Gogh.
Tony Clark and the other side of sculpture

Jan 22, 2025 | artguide.com.au | Sally Gearon

For over four decades, Tony Clark’s painting practice has merged a deep appreciation for art history with a desire to push beyond the traditional confines of prescribed mediums. Known for landscape paintings that both subvert and celebrate the genre, he has turned his attention to sculpture—or the idea of it—in a major career retrospective at Buxton Contemporary.
Abstracting time

Jan 15, 2025 | artguide.com.au | Sally Gearon

“I’m after an experience for the viewer,” said Mark Rothko in a 1958 lecture at the Pratt Institute, “one that involves his emotions as well as his intellect.” Claire Sourgnes and Kezia Geddes have adopted this approach in the curation of Arriving Slowly: Exploring the Abstract at Ipswich Art Gallery. “Some abstraction is deeply intellectual, and not emotional at all,” says Sourgnes.
Stranger than fiction: Magritte and Cao Fei

Nov 27, 2024 | artguide.com.au | Sally Gearon

I was about 15 when I decided my favourite artwork was René Magritte’s The Lovers, having seen an image of it in a high school art class textbook. I think it was the melodrama of the whole thing. The blatant challenge to us, the voyeuristic viewers. The question of the lovers’ identities—who are they? Do they know each other? Can we ever really know someone? And why, among the melodrama, does it also feel so sombre? This last question, I later learnt the answer to.
The rhythm of creating

Nov 20, 2024 | artguide.com.au | Sally Gearon

An obvious statement: artmaking is integral to art. Process can sometimes get lost behind product, but any maker knows that time spent in the studio playing with materials, trying new things out and pottering, is where the magic happens. Jess Tan is invoking the pottering methodology— “tinkering with things in a process-lead practice”—in a new exhibition at PS Art Space, in partnership with Cool Change Contemporary.
Present moments at the Gold Coast Triennial

Nov 6, 2024 | artguide.com.au | Sally Gearon

The Gold Coast Triennial launched at Home of the Arts (HOTA) in 2021, aiming to represent the depth and dynamism of the city’s artistic community. Three years on from the inaugural exhibition, Solid Gold: Artists from Paradise, the Triennial returns for round two with Here and Now. “It really takes the temperature of the cultural sector of the Gold Coast at the moment” says Susi Muddiman OAM, director of gallery and visual arts at HOTA.
Ellen Dahl creates a dialogue between places

Oct 20, 2024 | artguide.com.au | Sally Gearon

Photography can reveal something about a place, if you give it time. Ellen Dahl has noticed this throughout her decades-long practice. “It takes a long time for me to properly understand what it is I’ve captured,” she says.