Irene Walls 2021

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Exhibition of sculpture by Irene Walls who brings to her new exhibition a lifetime of fascination with found objects from the natural world. 

Gathering a history cast before her by wind, sea and time, Irene constructs an uncompromising world of loss, whose gain can only be found in the philosophical and intellectual realisations of its nature.  In the detritus of the past she finds keys to decisions about the future of our world and the reasons to treasure it.

From her childhood box of collected shells, via the beaches, woods and mountains of three continents, Irene has condensed all of her appreciation of the physical world and its evolution into a workshop full of feathers, seeds, coloured fragments of glass, ancient mosaic stones, driftwood and dreams. 

Throughout Irene's life, on her many travels across the world and across Australia, wherever she went, small objects of interest found their way from the earth into her luggage.  Back home in Sydney these objects have been slowly assembled into new worlds and new meanings in this latest expression of her earth-centric philosophy.  

The assemblage of fiction and fact in these works elicits a new view of their elemental context, leading the viewer to meditate upon the value of the natural world, humankind's attempts to understand and control it, and the beauty in ordinary things.