GROUND UP
&
Justine Wellman
OUR
STORY
Gallery Alchmey seeks to represent work across painting, drawing, photography,sculpture and mixed media. With a focus on contemporary and emergingartists with the gallery featuring work with a modern, figurative sensibility that is emotionally rich and poignant, and also conveying wit and humour.
Gallery Alchemy represents emerging and established artists that demonstratea sensitivity to the conundrums of modern life. With the galleries owninfluences stretching from Artemisia & Caravaggio to Van Gogh, to YellowHouse to Duchamp, Dada, Brett Whitely and Charlie Sheard.
Featured artists often reflect a sensibility for light, colour, purity of craft and ahint of neuroses and angst of modern life that ultimately gives way to beauty. “Idon’t believe in Art, I believe in the Artist”
– Marcel Duchamp
MEAGAN JACOBS
“Meagan Jacobs is a rarity. Rare in the subtlety of her colour and rare in her soulful and concrete commitment to landscape. Composed of strong interlocking forms, her work is meditative, both tightly knit and unpredictably expansive. “It’s strange” she admits “to fit the whole of the desert into the small square of a painting. Looking out into this amazing vista, how do you compress it? I guess my discipline is to distil. What is physically available becomes a template for the infinite.
The influence of mountains and boulders lends a replete quality to her paintings. Each piece locks boldly into place. The sharp contrasts of colour work like tectonic plates, thrusting landforms from their ancient roosts, presenting an earth that is volatile and alive. Wedding bare expanses of colour to pockets of intricate pattern, the impact is tactile. While most of the paintings are not massive in scale they are immersive. A potent yield of so many years in wild places”.
Anna Johnson When Meagan isn’t out in the desert you will find her painting in the attic studio, one of Miltons oldest buildings.
JUSTINE
WELLMAN
I live on Yuin Country, Milton on the NSW South Coast.
I studied Visual Arts at Newcastle University and NSW TAFE Colleges in West Wollongong & Bomaderry.
In only what I can describe as a whim, I changed focus from art, and went on to study horticulture.
In the horticultural area I stayed for nearly 2 decades, working various fields, culminating in owning a retail nursery and landscape business. I’m captivated my creativity with flora and making gardens. I love plants, I can spend infinite time twirling a flower in my fingers, looking at its construction and form, the way the glistening shades of colour fade through a petal. I could talk about the shapes of leaves juxtaposed against other leaves in contrast for hours, or the sinewy bark of a gum tree, or rattle off a few botanical names even though no one asked me. The perfect state
of a flower in comparison to a fading, chewn or misshapen bloom holds the same wonder.
It wasn’t until my youngest of 5 children started school, did the need for creating art start growing again.
There is something primal about clay, it is from the earth, plants grow in it, humans have dug clay and sculpted it for eons.
Through my art practice and process, I’m continually observing and engaged with the natural world, evoking a visual connection to a subject, whether it be a flower, a feeling or a memory.
Some of my ceramic vessel sculptures also have adjoined woven components. I collect the grass myself, processing it into rope that I then hand stitch to a ceramic piece. The clay and the grass grow together.
The combination of the two mediums complement each other, I like finding connection through colour or shape. Two mediums that never really live alone, relying on each other for structure and completeness.