WENDY STAVRIANOS EXHIBITION REVIEWED BY CHRISTOPHER HEATHCOTE

Wendy Stavrianos’s ‘Gathering’ series fills the exhibition space at Nicholas Thompson Gallery over in Collingwood. In recent years this gallery has been dipping into old canvases stored in her studio, then presenting shows which review aspects of this senior artist’s career. Stavrianos is known as a project based artist, each of her many shows amounting to an integrated body of visual work on a specified theme. There are 15 interlinking paintings in oil executed between 2003 and 2025 in the present exhibition, including one piece which was a chosen finalist for the AGNSW’s Sulman Prize in 2007.

The ‘Gathering’ series was prompted by an examination of Jean-François Millet’s studied paintings, drawings and prints of rural peasantry in France, especially his celebrated picture The Gleaners (1857). Stavrianos was fascinated to learn how in former times country women at the economic bottom wore at their waists a loose fabric gunny bag. Anything edible or potentially useful they came across outdoors during daily activities (ripe fruit, berries, ears of grain, seeds, herbs, honeycomb, bird’s eggs, fresh shellfish) was gathered and carefully put in this bag for later use—much as the impoverished women are shown doing in The Gleaners. (In Lark Rise, her 1939 memoir of 19th century rural life, Flora Thompson wrote of seeing women doing similar as a young girl in 1870s Oxfordshire.)

Stavrianos used this motif and its associated practise to devise a series of oil paintings on an environmental theme. Each symmetrical composition depicts a coloured cloth bag in which appears something found locally in Central Victoria, which is endangered by rural development or climate issues: a blackbird, rosella parrots, a hawk, shellfish from a creek, branches of native shrubs, some stones and soil, a roadkill fox (illus. above). The suggestion is these things have been gathered in and saved for later by local women concerned for their land. In some canvases the hanging fabric bag contains miniature landscapes, including mountain ranges, areas of bushland, grasslands, and Mt Gaspard overlooking the artist’s home (named for the master landscape painter Gaspard Poussin, brother-in-law of France’s leading Baroque artist Nicholas Poussin).

Summer’s bushfire crisis in Central Victoria has given an additional edge to her environmental message. Stavrianos nearly saw the show go up in smoke when a bushfire came blowing toward her home and studio during January (she lives between Sth Ravenswood and Maldon). The artist and her partner, the landscape painter Craig Gough, were evacuated and had to wait nervously until a wind change saw the blaze shift direction.