AMY CUNEO | HOUSE HOLD
3 - 25 MARCH 2023
In Amy Cuneo’s new show HOUSE HOLD, the proximity of painting to daily life is recorded in a tender state of flux. Her previous exhibition captured the quiet of a house asleep and the domestic interior in resting pose. Now the sun filters through windows to reorganise a daytime interior. When this natural light makes contact with a vase or bottle we get fascinating refractions and distortions that work visually and metaphorically. A painting of yellow things on a table curves back on itself within a central glass jar that holds a flourish of callistemon flowers. A pineapple round sits at the centre and then leads us to a slender illuminated candle on the right. Time to paint is more fragmented in the motherscape, and perhaps like the house itself, the lit candle holds onto time. In HOUSE HOLD the act of painting runs in parallel with the complexities of caring.
In conversation, Amy Cuneo discusses how “we are held by the house, but we hold the house. Things are in motion as a reorganising interior landscape.
“We can see this in the subtle way that the figures emerge. The containment of bodies in the domestic space is a quietly syncopated element.”
In the complex work PROVISIONS, the head of a dog pops up behind the kitchen bench, extending through a beautifully pitched mauve shadow that leads our eyes to where we then see a child. The mother and child emerge slowly as figures in this domestic sphere but then become essential elements in framing the picture. WATER’S WAYS ponders fluidity and circularity. The cooling spray of the hose falls to droplets under a native hibiscus bloom. There at the base of the image the kitchen tap delivers water with a different vertical force. In THE MADONNA THAT DAY NAPS, bodies become texture. Light is cast over figures, pushing away from detail to reveal shape through borrowed textures that wrap the skin. The dog curls into itself like a curve in a rug. COULD YOU PASS THE BLUES presents a table setting of cut kiwi fruit and book stacks. Then we notice a hand reaching in from the right-hand side, coming into focus slowly as a peripheral gesture with smudging purple-blue edges. The body is never a separate entity and at times it feels like the hand of the artist herself -- applying paint or enacting another adjustment to the surface.
Searching In Pyrol, 2022. 41 x 30.5 cm, acrylic on board, framed. SOLD
Light Leaners, 2022. 41 x 30.5 cm, acrylic on board, framed. SOLD
Luminous tints allow for rhythm between spaces, objects and bodies. PROVISIONS embraces complementary pairings, blues and oranges bound together in the details of kitchen tiles and tablecloth. Cuneo describes larger works like this one as involving a composite layering of elements.
“I’m starting by doing a drawing from life and then it works up. I might have flowers in the studio that will come into it later – using my own photographs as reference.”
Across the works we can see that the interior offers a framework for multiple smaller elements in easy motion. Her interiors hold multitudes of moments generated initially from direct sketches that are then built up and revisited in her home studio. The domestic experience becomes a looping interplay of responsive movement, captured moments and shifting light. The table setting is a demonstration of care and expediency, but also an aesthetic expression within available means. The lining up of the fruit, the colourful counterplay between blood oranges and a soft pink ceramic bowl is then picked up in other highlights – a cookbook, the bell-like forms of a coastal correa flower. Visual choices are made in painting as they are in daily life.
Could You Pass The Blues?, 2022. 80 x 80 cm, acrylic on board. AUD 2,350
Works like YOU ARE A LANDSCAPE face up to this dynamic for an artist with small children. Amy Cuneo now feels less of a wrestle even as her parenting role broadens, stating,
“It’s okay to make myself smaller for them to expand.”
Across the works we can see that the interior offers a framework for multiple smaller elements in easy motion. Her interiors hold multitudes of moments generated initially from direct sketches that are then built up and revisited in her home studio. The domestic experience becomes a looping interplay of responsive movement, captured moments and shifting light. The table setting is a demonstration of care and expediency, but also an aesthetic expression within available means. The lining up of the fruit, the colourful counterplay between blood oranges and a soft pink ceramic bowl is then picked up in other highlights – a cookbook, the bell-like forms of a coastal correa flower. Visual choices are made in painting as they are in daily life.
Provision, 2022. 80 x 120 cm, acrylic on board. AUD 2,950
Buffered, 2022. 41 x 30.5 cm, acrylic on board. AUD 1,250
Celestial Oatmeal, 2023. 30.5 x 23 cm, acrylic on board, framed. SOLD
Still Or Sparkling, 2022. 41 x 30.5 cm, acrylic on board. SOLD
I Could Have Been A Whistle, 2022. 76 x 61 cm, acrylic on board, framed. SOLD
Pick Up Drop Off, 2023. 76 x 60 cm, acrylic on board, framed. SOLD
You Are A Landscape, 2022. 60 x 60 cm, acrylic on board. AUD 1,650
Holding Up Holding On, 2022. 80 x 80 cm, acrylic on board. AUD 2,350
Briefly Gorgeous, 2022. 60 x 60 cm, acrylic on board. SOLD
Peaches, Cheeses, Peaches, 2023. 60 x 60 cm, acrylic on board. AUD 1,650
Water's Ways, 2023. 80 x 80 cm, acrylic on board. AUD 2,350
We Cover You, 2023. 60 x 76 cm, acrylic on board, framed. SOLD
The Madonna Day Naps (In Socks), 2023. 80 x 120 cm, acrylic on board. AUD 2,950
