The longer you stay with Paige Northwood’s work, the more it reveals itself. Colour, texture and line are brought together in imperfect representations of land and earth. Exhibited in her new body of work, ‘Sacred Life’ on show at Jerico Contemporary, 10 small-form hanging works invoke careful inspection and contemplation. At a glance, they’re paintings, but moving closer discloses mark making immortalised in fired clay. The faint smell of eucalyptus emanates from their timber frames, a lingering aroma of some distant place; of a life that was before. Leaning closer, elements of inky black clay and glazes coloured luminous gold whisper stories that have made them whole.
The earth is intrinsically linked to Northwood’s practice. As a ceramicist first and foremost, Northwood’s relationship to clay runs deep. The material guides her ability and method as she plies her hands to the medium, creating organic-like vessels and clay forms, with no two outcomes destined to be the same. In developing her most recent exhibition, while living rurally in the Northern Territory—between the communities of Alice Springs and Hermannsburg—the artist has extended her ways of artistic expression to encompass painting. Her work is a product of what Northwood describes as "visceral play".
These small works speak volumes as representations of Northwood's intuitive resonance with the materials at hand. The artist invites the viewer to contemplate both physical and emotional feeling through her work. We see the artist will herself to be present and at one with her body in the creation of the works; endeavouring to produce pure, conscious art making. As a result, we're presented with artefacts of self-creation. 'in this body' (2019) sees fingerprints mark a transcendental map, where 'we forgot to listen' (2019) urges us to tune in to the world around us, to listen and to simply be.