The works of printmaker Niloufar Lovegrove in Too Little, Too Much represent a deft fusion of cultures that not only allows profound new perspectives on environmental crises, but also acts as an exploration of the artist’s personal identity.
Too Little, Too Much is a meditation on water through linocuts. The works were created over the last three years, during a time when eastern Australia experienced multiple disasters: drought, bushfire and catastrophic flooding.
While these environmental catastrophes weighed on Lovegrove, her centering of water themes is delivered via an almost otherworldly, figurative visual language informed by her background. “You’ll see the use of ancient mythology and historic motifs from my Persian heritage to retell our current news, in order to specify the timelessness of the theme,” she says. “My first sketches were directly taken from the extremes of flood and fire, translating into misery and sorrow. Gradually they shifted away and started to picture an ideal habitable land instead.”
Lovegrove, who is originally from Iran and now lives at The Caves in Central Queensland, is drawn to the imagery and mythology of Persia for its oneiric, other-worldly qualities and escapism, as well as its “mystical poetry”.
“For me, the sense of rhythm and idealism in Persian artforms is fascinating, and [represents] a desire to open the window to an almost unearthly love, by the adoption of symbolic elements.”
The show also addresses Lovegrove’s personal history, as she reconciles living in rural Queensland with her earlier life. “I have found myself trying to recapture memories by using these Persian motifs and stories to express a feeling or react to a current event. This helps me personally, in connecting my old knowledge to my current lifestyle, as well as offering the viewer a quick escape to another world: Iran.”
Too Little, Too Much
Niloufar Lovegrove
Artspace Mackay
Until 5 February
This article was originally published in the January/February 2023 print edition of Art Guide Australia.
In a new collaborative exhibition at PS Art Space, in partnership with Cool Change Contemporary, five artists with process-lead practices contemplate material ethics through actively engaging in slowness and reuse.
Isaac Julien’s 2022 video work Once Again…(Statues Never Die) exposes the unseen emotional registers inherent to the struggle for colonial repatriation by mapping the places where poetics and politics intersect.
A new exhibition at the Australian National Capital Artists Inc (ANCA) asks 12 artists—including Dan Powers, S.A.Adair, Emma Beer and Lisa Sammut—to explore scale: from the miniature to the monumental.
Ahead of his major retrospective at Jan Murphy Gallery, Ben Quilty spoke with fellow painter Georgia Spain about wrestling with mythology, the contradictions of joy and suffering, and a belief in art as an antidote to an increasingly volatile world.
A Delicate Terrain, a new exhibition of works drawn from the Tweed Regional Gallery collection, looks at our relationship with the environment through the lens of contemporary art.
About Face is a smart piece of marketing. The new book on portrait painting from Australia and New Zealand has a mission to change buyers’ minds about the field. But as Jane O’Sullivan discovers, any sales pitch wears thin if it’s repeated often enough, and the close attention to how portrait painting is received by the market means that other important conversations fade to the background.
