Neridah Stockley: A Secular View

Neridah Stockley: A Secular View is an exhibition spanning twenty-five years of sustained practice by Northern Territory based artist Neridah Stockley and is curated by Gillean Shaw, Art Curator, University of Newcastle Art Gallery. Whilst Stockley is best known as a painter, this survey reveals the diversity of her practice including drawings, collage, dry point etchings and a growing body of ceramic work.

The idea of a ‘survey’ plays on the notion of surveying the landscape, whether urban, rural or domestic. Through numerous en plein air encounters Stockley creates a personal record that is later reworked and resolved in the studio. 

Stockley’s work is characterised by abstracted compositions that hint at narrative or symbolic content, traversing memory and experience in an ongoing dialogue with visual interpretation. Domestic in scale, she invites the viewer to encounter a section of surveyed and deconstructed landscape, through a process of re-visioning the natural and manufactured world into linear and geometric planes and forms.

The exhibition explores the depth of the artist’s oeuvre, presenting Stockley’s individual approach to abstraction, gestural mark-making and lyrical style to create a distinctive visual vernacular.