philip hunter

artist in residence 2015

ARTIST IN RESIDENCE 2015
31 July - 29 August

• geophonics [15]

Philip Hunter is a Melbourne artist who has exhibited regularly since 1980 at numerous commercial galleries around Australia and has held major solo exhibitions of his work at various public galleries and museums. His work has been represented by Olsen Irwin Galleries, Sydney; Philip Bacon Galleries in Brisbane and Sophie Gannon Gallery, Melbourne.

Philip Hunter initially studied painting at Prahran College in the 1970s. He has since been awarded a MFA from the Victorian College of the Arts (Uni Melb) and a PhD from Deakin University in 1999.

"My primary concern has been to examine ways of painting about the spaces we inhabit either physically or imaginatively. My speculation is that to maintain successful relationships with each other, we by necessity, must establish successful relationships with the places where we live.

Over a period of time I have tried to hold at the very front of all of my responses to the landscape, the idea that we occupy and live upon the oldest, driest and flattest terrain on the planet. For the best part of a decade, I have developed sequences of images that have collectively been referred to as The Flatlands Project. Many of the paintings, drawings and prints refer to aspects of the landscape that aren’t so easily seen. I’ve thought about the movement of agricultural machinery through the landscape, looked at the meanderings of livestock and wildlife and considered various events that might afford us an alternative spatial reading of the place.

I have painted about wind gusts and soil migration, dry land, salinity and the rhythmic sway of vast acreages of crops and native grasses. Cloud shadows have been included as subjects and more recently, the imagined noises and sounds of the geo-sphere itself"

Philip Hunter 2015