Nancy Whittaker, Tarrangower Times
The MANet gallery is proud to present not one, but three artists exhibiting this month. MANet Gallery is an amazing little space, punching well above its weight, thanks to the tireless and creative work of Catherine Tait, who attracts talented local artists to exhibit there. May brings three local well-known artists to present their work. They are Catherine O’Leary, Fionna Madigan and Mary Caspar.
Many years ago, I was involved in developing a flier about the importance of the arts. It was called simply Imagine Life Without The Arts. It went on to say ‘Victoria needs people who are: creative, inventive, problem solvers, communicators, skilful, enterprising, resourceful, literate and flexible.’ What would we have? A dull , dreary , uninteresting world. ‘A world without THE ARTS.’ You could safely say the work of these three artists demonstrate these qualities in very different ways.
Catherine O’Leary works primarily with wool fibre and silk fabrics.
Her artwork is two-dimensional or sculptural in nature.
“The fall of light and the shadows it creates plays an important role in the positive and negative spaces within my artwork. I am fascinated with the shadowed areas found in the internal spaces within my work.”
She describes her work thus, “I have developed a style of felt making which is very fine; with the surface of the felt being evenly textured and fibrous. The sculptural shapes are hollow and skillfully manipulated. There is a stillness embodied in my art. I endeavour to construct my work to appear solid and sedentary, but there is an ephemeral lightness in the physicality of my work.”
Her three-dimensional felt works almost defy gravity.
Fionna Madigan describes her work as, “A fertile zone between abstraction and realism; where scale is ambiguous, where the macro and micro slide in and out of awareness.” She said, “I commence with compositional goals and encourage random occurrences. Improvisation and transience are integral concepts to my creative endeavours. I am interested in the experience of perception; what happens when we look at something; the way our bodies and visual cortex metabolise and interpret information.”
“I like to keep the wall between what we know and what we don’t know, permeable. I like to play in the space between what we can control and what we can’t.” Her medium involving beeswax enables her to paint in layers. She added that, “the Goldfields are a never-ending source of inspiration.”
Mary Caspar has been an artist for 60 years and is making compelling art into her 80s. I met the third artist Mary Caspar many years ago when she was the Artistic Director of Spadeworks, which was held in the Newstead Community Centre in March 2015. Mary trained at RMIT in the 60s and has always been a working artist. She is represented in collections both here and overseas. While she took up painting in her forties, sometime after undertaking a sculpture course with Shane Merry at Box Hill TAFE. (Incidentally, Shane was formerly an art teacher at Boort – he’s a long time ago, where he taught my three sisters).
Mary has an inimitable style of painting people, which involves what she describes as ‘more head work’ than if she is painting a still life. To quote a comment about an earlier exhibition of Mary’s work at Lot 19 in Castlemaine: “There are many reasons to make art…to document, comment, reflect, grieve, forgive, explore or just because you have to, to quote Nietzsche, in order to not die from the truth.” Her prints and paintings are quite wondrous, with vivid use of colour and fine line work.
The MANet Art Gallery at 27 Main Street Maldon is open from Friday – Saturday, from 11am – 3pm. For further information: 0419 119 047.
This article appeared in Tarrangower Times, 25 April 2025.
