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Louise Tate / Intimacies

‘Beneath its russet wood, a wardrobe is a very white almond’, says Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space, ‘Its inner space is intimate space’.

Recent RMIT graduate Louise Tate’s latest body of work discovers intimacy within spaces of domesticity. Translucent layers of watercolour, oil, or synthetic polymer paint build up to form the patterned surfaces and textured interiors sourced from a growing collection of interior design images. Each painting evolves from a fragmented detail of a selected photograph. Despite the non-personal nature of these designed spaces, the paintings reveal that fabricated rooms and furnishings can nonetheless generate a poetic sense of familiarity. Tenderness is found in the folds of a never-before-seen bedspread; armchairs creak under imaginary weightless bodies. These are painted images laden with nostalgia for the forgotten spaces of intimate moments. Resisting any sort of overarching linearity, each painting instead exists in a fragmented period of time that combine to tell an alternate narrative. Not specified by any one particular point in history, but rather an imagined narrative ‘intimately linked to the dynamism of temporality itself’ (in the words of Elizabeth Grosz).

Louise Tate is a Melbourne-based emerging artist whose practice incorporates painting and writing in order to investigate ideas of historical time, overlapping histories and their relationship to interior and architectural space. She recently completed a Bachelor of Fine Art with 1st Class Honours from RMIT University in 2016 and is currently undertaking a Master of Art Curatorship at The University of Melbourne to further her interest in curation and the role of art institutions in the contemporary art world. Louise has exhibited both in Melbourne and Geelong, as well as interstate and internationally. She has been shortlisted for several awards, and was recently selected for the SEVENTH 2017 Emerging Writers Program. She will further be working as an artist in residence at the NARS Foundation in New York next year.

Intimacies runs June 22 – July 15. To see a full exhibition listing click here.