FRONT GALLERY: ROWENA BOYD (SA) - TENDER SLOPES

Pushing the material boundaries of encaustic paint, Rowena Boyd employs the language of painterly abstraction to explore a more fluid, multimodal concept of the senses. The consuming, visually seductive tactile colour fields she creates probe the sensuous, stimulating material resonance, instinct, gut feeling, and sensory curiosity. Rowena is driven by a fascination with the scientific and phenomenological underpinnings of sensory integration and separation, and drawn to the freedom of and potential for art to examine these peculiarities of experience. Her new works, showing in Tender Slopes, delve into the pre-verbal translation of affect that occurs in the act of making and receiving paintings. Crafted through a process of accreting thousands of brush-strokes of thin, molten beeswax upon a support, her delicate surfaces suggest gravity, skin, pressure, liquid, solid, and molten forms. Prompting us to think about physical sensations and material ambiguities, these experimental works provoke the desire to touch, stirring sensory intimacy, curiosity and pleasure. Her paintings operate in the visceral sweet spot that language can never quite perfectly articulate, resonating within the body and at ones fingertips.