Fiona Lowry
For all their beguiling appearance and subtle diffuse tones, Fiona Lowry’s paintings evoke an air of suspense, of hovering disquiet, of even perhaps some mischief lurking in those woods and trees. Her paintings are quiet; an air of lingering silence and tranquillity hangs in the stillness of her landscapes and the solitude of her figures. And yet they are intensely romantic: those ghostly but substantive figures who loom from within the tangled trees are figures whose isolation speaks of the despair of a broken promise. They appear as dreams more than they do of any sense of the real world. Our emotions become blurred like the imagery, and yet we are moved by the sheer mystery and vulnerability of those stoic but ethereal figures. We are disturbed, but we are full of empathy.
Fiona Lowry’s distinctive technique of the fine airbrush is the perfect vehicle for her art of subversion and suggestion, in which definition is uncertain and reality seems to hover without ever quite coming into clear view. We respond to that constant air of mystery and uncertainty in her work with an instinctive empathy for those often forlorn figures. We recognise them as our fellow human beings, although they are hard to grasp. These are beautiful paintings, but like so much beauty they have an aura of fragility behind which may lurk a darker truth.
The sense of unease that her ominous, brooding and diffused figures present immediately sets us, the viewers, on an intriguing and slightly disturbing path. Behind that state of psychological disquiet we sense some kind of menace or threat and yet we recognise in the plight of those figures hints of vulnerability and isolation. Those muted and often unlikely tones, the greys, pinks and soft fluorescent greens, those blurred definitions, combine in images of seduction and sensuality. I look at those enigmatic woods and trees and feel the temptation to enter, to discover what mischief, what malevolence, they are concealing behind their benign façades. They rouse in us an irresistible urge of enquiry.
The story of ‘Black Caesar’ is the perfect drama for Fiona Lowry to recall and explore. He is a figure who emerges from the earliest pages of Australia’s European history, a convict of unknown African parentage convicted of theft in England and transported to the other side of the world, arriving in Botany Bay with the First Fleet in early 1788. Described as ‘incorrigibly stubborn with a frame that was muscular and well calculated for hard labour …’, he spent a lifetime in trouble, but at least fathered a daughter through his liaison with Ann Power, a fellow malfeasant who had arrived in Australia in 1790 on board the Lady Juliana, a ship laden with 222 female convicts, described by one unwelcoming officer as a cargo of ‘damned whores’. It is a story redolent of a grim history and one that touches the heart for its despair and its inevitable, lamentable conclusion, for Black Caesar was shot in 1796 and the fate of Ann Power is unrecorded. A dark moment of history, which is revealed in Fiona Lowry’s most contemporary subtle tones, mellifluous textures and mysterious veiled visual language.