Exhibition to offer creative insight

A LOCAL artist with more than four decades of experience is giving people an inside look into her creative process as part of the next exhibition at Ross Creek Gallery.

Visual creative Sue Sedgwick’s upcoming show called Work in Progress will see her unearth hundreds of works both finished and unfinished in what she said is a retrospective of her artistic journey.

“It’s a chance to get things out that have been in storage for a long time and to see what it all looks like together and what it tells me about my own creative practice,” she said.

“I’m including finished works but also ones that are exploratory or didn’t work, or at the time I didn’t like. I’m also including journal excerpts I’ve kept all the way through, sketches from travels.”

The exhibition will include a range of mediums such as charcoal drawings, watercolour and acrylic works, prints, and photographs.

Work in Progress’s oldest featured piece dates back to 1986.

“The subject matter varies,” Sedgwick said. “It’s always figurative. There’s always something recognisable about it.

“It starts with life drawings then moves onto landscape when we could travel more once the kids grew up. There’s a lot of the Mallee up to Lake Mungo, central Australia, and around New South Wales from over the last 10, 15 years.”

Sedgwick said she hopes her intimate offering into the artistic process can have a positive influence on other creatives.

“I feel like a lot of the time, people walk into a gallery and see a finished work,” she said. “They might give it a couple minutes when it’s taken a long time to get to that point.

“I’m looking forward to sharing this with my arts community, and I’d like it to be encouraging for people who don’t think of themselves as artists to take their work a bit more seriously.

“People might be interested to see behind the scenes of creativity. It’ll be like a salon hang, and all the pictures will be covering the walls. It’s like a look into the studio.”

Sedgwick has been a practicing artist since the late 1970s after studying at what was formerly known as the Ballarat College of Advanced Education at Mount Helen.

The exhibition will be on show from Saturday 2 until Sunday 17 November.

The opening day launch will run from 1pm to 4pm.