August Carpenter
August Carpenter uses a drawing and print based practice as a platform to examine interactions between person and place, in particular the effect emotion has in manipulating the recollection of a place real or recalled. Having grown up in the densely-populated, skyscraper-filled cities of London and Singapore, she has commented that her move to Australia, and a sense of the scale of the landscape here – as well as the catastrophic weather and climate events which move across it – has fuelled her interest in climate and its effect on landscape.
Her work teeters between documentation and imagination, reflecting a broader meditation on the difficulty of locating clarity in a world were meaning often remains shrouded. With gestural marks breaking through swathes of black, there is a sense of forms emerging from the darkness, barely perceptible, as if drawn through a mist.
August’s latest body of work continues her focus on atmospheric and emotional climates, capturing the ways in which we navigate uncertainty and imperceptible forces. Drawing on past explorations of landscape, climate and loss, Carpenter’s abstractions speak not only to the visible world but also to the hidden, to the unspoken and to the things that are simply too vast to fully comprehend.
