time changes everything

Fiona Lowry’s paintings depict the Australian landscape as a site of romanticism, violence and moral ambiguity. Her signature airbrushing technique and pastel tones render forest, bush and outback scenes dreamy yet haunting. With the aura of foggy memories, Lowry’s works speak to spaces both physical and psychological.

In time changes everything, the natural environment becomes a stage for human action and emotion. Depicting a lone nude figure walking towards a looming forest, the scene appears innocuous upon first glance. Yet, the psychedelic tones of trees, hazy air-brushed textures, and low-angle perspective begin to cumulatively build a sense of unease, of disorientation, and perhaps even menace. As with most of Lowry’s works, this painting holds tensions between the alluring and foreboding.

Lowry’s works possess an intrigue and unknowability, such that the context of her images isn’t immediately apparent and left open to interpretation. Nonetheless, they hint at the complex realities that inform her practice. Ever conscious of how colonisation continues to shape relationships to the Australian landscape, Lowry here recasts this site as one of intensity and intrigue and as a deeply emotive space upon which we project fantasy and fear, memory and imagination.