Crafted to be viewed as a narrative body, ‘Dissolution’ (2024) is a reflection on the cyclical nature of struggle and redemption.

Using symbolic references to pre-imperial cultures, phenomenal idealism, and archetype as the vehicle, Sian de Gourlay examines internal terrains of suffering and acceptance.

He displays a series of fiction paintings which, through the depiction of neolithic adjacent scenes, mourns a way of being there is no longer room for. In the same breath it offers a vision of a cultural and environmental healing, born from spiritual resilience, that hinges on a collective dissent against long held cultural understandings of tradition, heritage, and order.

Sian de Gourlay’s faceless figures are planted into the landscapes he paints; like Pandora, they seem to be crafted from clay. They are guardians of a state to aspire to. Surrounded by fantastic nature, they are almost alien in their otherworldliness, and their impenetrable stoicism.

Contrastingly, the frenzied pencil marks of ‘Pining Percept’ (2024) force us to wrestle through a forest, using our vision as a machete, providing insight into the rough mark making that precedes
the soft layering of his paintings. ‘Dissolution’ is the meeting point of two ends of a circle, welded together with imagined histories and futures.

– Ava Cowperthwaite

Studio Portrait 2024, © Stella McGarvey