In this latest series of work, Newcastle Artist Luke Beezley, sets up camp in the sclerophyll forest of the mind where he rubs up against spiky foliage and sleeps on sandy soil with the bones of Australian modernists. His emblematic large-scale black and white wood-cuts cross pollinate on papery wings with the flora and fauna of suburban fantasia.
If the platypus is the result of natural selection and continental drift, Beezley’s images are the marriage of disparate parts joined to invent exotic new species. His work is never far from where we dwell. From the campsite he contemplates the great Australian emptiness and its tenuous grip on a colonial inheritance. He prescribes to the Australian mistrust of European style.
Beezley has exhibited widely in Newcastle and recently with Curve Gallery at the Liverpool Biennial (UK). He has been a practising artist since graduating in the early eighties and has continued to develop his practice in shared studios and exhibition spaces within Newcastle. Inspired by travels in Europe and Indonesia, it was the Wayan kulit (shadow puppets), batiks and art of South East Asia that have made a lasting impression on Beezley’s artistic practice.
