vera möller
below low
31 july - 29 august 2015
Artist talk:
5.30pm Friday 31 July
Enter an underwater world of exquisite beauty in Vera MÖller's exhibition of new paintings.
Surreal, dreamy and abstract, these artworks have been inspired by a recent residency on Heron Island and informed by Möller's background as a microbiologist.
In 2013 Vera Möller was invited to be artist in residence at the University of Queensland Research Station on Heron Island in the Great Barrier Reef. Here she was able to explore fringing reefs in the company of two marine biologists. She recalls that "one of the sites we explored together is a well known diving and snorkelling destination, the Heron Bommie, a location containing formidable coral and sponge formation in underwater canyons that had come to prominence in the 1960s when it was named by famous Frenchman Jacques Cousteau as one of his top ten diving sites in the world."
These breathtaking underwater worlds have inspired a new series of paintings. Möller is interested in how a diver's perception of these worlds can be translated and explored as intriguing spatial perspectives in paintings. She describes the experience as "floating and swaying with the currents, the diver's sensorial experiences of smell and taste become insignificant. Audible are only a mix of dulled and monotone sounds. Consequently vision becomes the primary sense with which the diver interacts with the surrounding space, engaging with a visual field that expands through the aqueous element and diminishes into the distance and towards infinity. Forms, surfaces and tissues of underwater fauna and flora resist definition, they are unacquainted to both sight and touch. These are encounters with an overwhelming variety of otherworldly life forms with characteristically scintillating colours and colour contrasts. One comes in close contact with intricate surfaces, mysterious structures and transparent, gelatinous forms. One is able to experience the presence of an array of utterly strange and complex visual phenomena, of opalescence, luminescence, and iridescence, and thus, the encountered spaces assume an almost hallucinatory quality."
Vera Möller was born in 1955 in Germany and arrived in Australia in 1986. She studied Biology, Microbiology and obtained a Bachelor of Education in Germany, followed by studies in Fine Art in Melbourne at the Victorian College of the Arts (1990-98) and a PhD at Monash University in 2007. She has exhibited extensively throughout Australia and overseas, and her artworks can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, Artbank, BHP Billiton, Monash University, Latrobe University and the Australian National Museum.
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