Sophie Ryan

Golden Hour

22 May to 16 June, 2024

Homestead Gallery 1

Golden Hour, known as the last hour before sunset. It is notorious for its beautiful golden light, in the last light of the day. This moment is constantly changing in its rich sunsets and deepening shadows, until at last it has faded away into another night.

Golden Hour explores these colourful skies, and the ephemerality of light and dark through landscapes in a space that exists between memory and representational forms. The series of paintings are inspired by studies, memory and photographs taken from the artist’s childhood home outside Bathurst on the Macquarie River. This body of work combines an exploration of colour, light and shadow, and looks to methods of painting in an active mode that documents an embodied experience of place, the feeling of home, joy, and memory.

This series uses landscapes and other depicted moments to respond to feelings of growth, and what it means to live in a new place but yearn for the grounding of familiarity and comforts. This body of work explores the meaning of home and introduces a sense of becoming open to an expanded idea of home and place.

About the artist

Sophie Ryan is an emerging artist originally from Bathurst, New South Wales. Sophie is driven by a deep connection to her surroundings and a desire to convey the vitality and movement of the world around her. Sophie moved to Canberra in 2018, undertaking study at The School of Art and Design at The Australian National University, where she graduated in 2022. Working primarily in painting, Sophie paints a variety of subjects explored through energy in gestural brushstrokes, and a bright colour palette to create a sense of connection to place and emotion. Sophie is currently looking into different ways of representing landscapes through gesture, embodiment, emotion and memory while combining elements of drawing and painting.

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