SALLY WRIGHT AND RAE SAHELI
THE BOLD MARK
13-29 August, 2021
THE BOLD MARK brings together a duet of new works by Gold Coast artists RAE SAHELI and SALLY WRIGHT. Their works cross-over in a shared focus on surface tensions and processes driven by the physical, and sometimes forceful, act of mark making. Collectively THE BOLD MARK hones in on the two dimensional surface as a target for graceful and explosive gestures.
ROOM SHEET with artist interview by curator Chris Bennie
ARTIST BIOS
RAE SAHELI lives and works on Yugambeh Country on Queensland’s Gold Coast. Rae’s formal training belies her current art making process, shifting beyond traditional applications to rendering her compositions through her recreational training as a rifle shooter, and employing a 12-gauge shotgun as her primary tool. Her process favours chance and chaos over any sense of pictorial order and is executed in the safety of a rifle range with special permissions. Her high velocity mark making takes aim at a range of artistic substrates including canvas, plywood and aluminum, to reveal intense physical and emotional gestures.
Rae has recently exhibited at Metro Arts, Tweed Regional Art Gallery, Northern Rivers Community Gallery and Brunswick Street Gallery, as well as with The Walls Art Space where she also undertook self directed residency as part of Summer Retreat in 2019. Rae completed an Advanced Diploma in Visual Arts at TAFE NSW, Murwillumbah, majoring in painting and printmaking in 2020, having previously majored in Painting and Life Drawing at TAFE Central Gippsland and undertaken mentorship in traditional painting techniques with Dick Bishop
SALLY WRIGHT lives and works on Yugambeh Country on Queensland’s Gold Coast. Predominantly a mark-maker with a painterly abstract style, Sally is interested in exploring surface, contrast, and hidden meanings. Encompassing painting, printmaking, drawing, collage and stop motion animation, her works explore notions of slow technology and the capture of ephemeral traces and actions. Her physical and digital accumulations, layers of paper and images, reveal swathes of broken-down colour and texture, and ghosts (traces left behind after a transfer), these are then transformed into spatial compositions, as installations and projections.
Sally has recently exhibited at Metro Arts, Lorraine Pilgrim Gallery and with Left Bank Art Group, as well as with The Walls Art Space as part of Summer Retreat in 2019 and The Field at M.Arts Precinct where she also undertook self directed residencies. After obtaining her Fine Art Degree from the School of Art, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Sally completed her Honours in Contemporary Art at U.T.A.S., Launceston, receiving the Painting Prize. Her works can be found in collections including National Gallery Australia, Bundaberg Regional Art Gallery and Swinburne University.