Opens Friday 29th November 6:00pm. Graphic artist and film producer Sophie Hall to open the event.
Melinda Moran
Lisa Wilkes Hunter
Sisters Melinda and Lisa’s passion for art started early in life, on the Northern Beaches, encouraged by a creative and talented family, in particular by their grandfather and prolific author, Richard Wilkes-Hunter.
Melinda Moran
Melinda Moran’s body of work in this current exhibition A Tale of Two Sisters features extraordinary, creative and breathtakingly beautiful nature photography.
Melinda explains that each of her finished photographs capture a fairy-tale and decorative pattern. “Like Christmas decorations on a tree, each bubble captivates and tantalises the viewer,” said Melinda. Using a special lens, Melinda spends many hours capturing the exact image she wants through a pinhole-sized water-drop on a spider’s web. Each image is carefully selected and many hours of painstaking concentration and waiting, and a fair degree of experimentation, are thrown into the mix.
“My work has various landscape themes; through water droplets, light drawings, rhythm and stills photography,” she says the current series captures a suspended matrix of water droplets on magical spiders’ webs. “It is amazing to look into water droplets of various sizes, comparable to pinheads, or as small as the tip of a pin,” Melinda explained. “A looking glass, through natures water, has beautifully created, multiple mini landscapes. My childhood played a significant part in my creation of this concept, with memories of my sister Michelle carrying me around on her right hip to introduce me to all the fairies and spiders that lived in Pop’s garden and under the house. “To circle back in time is to revisit special places, write anecdotes of those happy places and photograph them… I love photography and landscapes.”
Melinda’s photographic images capture a suspended matrix of water droplets on magical spiders’ webs. By her vision of a looking glass, through nature’s water, Melinda has amazingly created mini landscapes.
Lisa Wilkes Hunter
Lisa is stirred by the power, colour, mystery and contrasts of the natural world and “whilst I often use living energy – animals, people, the ocean, plants and trees as subject matter, I also include inert objects as a medium – eggs, sand, drift wood and recycled things (pages from my grandfather’s books), as a background to create a dreamlike, textured, collage effect”. After receiving a Diploma of Fine Art at Seaforth Technical College, majoring in photography, Lisa’s experimentation on the journey to develop a unique, identifiable, form of expression was eclectic and unrestrained. Her creative career has involved producing props for the Sydney Rock Eisteddfod, and designing, tailor made board games for the hospitality and gaming industries. Lisa says she has also been a human Bower Bird for most of her life. Collecting various eggshells held a particular fascination. She has given many of these new life and purpose and are often three dimensional additions to her exhibitions.
Lisa has always had a strong pull to the exotic animals and stories emanating from Africa. It was in her adult life that she discovered the connection. Africa was the birthplace of her paternal grandmother. Lisa’s travels to Africa, follow these past footsteps and family connections. Going off the well trodden tourist track and venturing across Botswana and Zimbabwe, and traversing the channels of the Okavango Delta in Morkoro, was the catalyst for the vision of many of her recent paintings. It established and provided the genesis for her first major solo exhibition “Eyes on Okavango”. This exhibition gathered in one place, with skilful technique, a love of family and its African history, a reverence of nature, animals and Africa. It is now followed in 2019 by a retrospective of recent works.