Tell me in colour

Natalie Bessell

4-15 August

Please join us for the opening celebration Thursday 6th August 6-8pm

In Tell Me in Colour I adopt the view of my three-year-old to find the romance, awe, and beauty in everyday life. She pulls me to the ground and we look at the flowers not from above but beside them, finding snails and tiny shells in the sandy soil. Many of the scenes illustrated are direct memories like this: for example, the task of braiding her hair or picking fruit. Others take on perspectives of farm animals, sailors, gardeners, or sirens that exist on our periphery. These simple moments are fleeting and blurry, so I hold them in frames and let the abstraction become as important as the subjects. Rather than their exact details, my goal is to capture the feelings associated with these memories which are here portrayed in colour.

Natalie Bessell grew up in California and has lived in Australia since 2021. She is a multi-disciplinary artist whose recent work, featuring figurative and abstract elements, primarily involves oil pastels on wood or paper and painted glaze on ceramics. Bessell is self-taught in ceramic hand-building and underglaze technique while she was formally trained in illustration at the Athenaeum Art Center, School of Visual Arts, and the New York Botanical Garden.

She draws inspiration from her life as a mother in a semi-rural beach town on the Mornington Peninsula, in the outskirts of Melbourne. Themes of nature, fertility, care-giving, and femininity have pervaded her work both before and after she became a mother. This reflects her more general fascination with the intersection of that which is ordinary and that which is magnificent. Her work is not entirely subject driven — what happens in the kiln, or in the behaviour of a glaze, often leads the way for a painting, while the malleability of clay reminds her to cut into wood, for example. The two mediums inform each other and allow her to move between craft and fine art without drawing a hard line between them.