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Recollected Colour: Lymesmith at the COX Gallery

Recollected Colour 

To recollect: the action or faculty of remembering or recollecting something, from Latin recollect – ‘gathered back’. 

Recollected: bring oneself back to a state of composure, collect or gather together again. 

COX Gallery Artist, Lymesmith

This exhibition brings together two strands of my recent work; the Brutal Transformations project, and Between Mountains, a 7-storey high mural painting. One speculative and one realised. Both works are about concrete, and about its transformation.

The Speculative (About Concrete) 

Brutal Transformations is an ongoing project by Lymesmith which hypothetically / digitally transforms Brutalist buildings with boldly applied colour. 

The series titled “hurry to where they still (bloom)”recasts the National Carillon not as a celebration of 50 years of colonial government, but as a memorial to colour lost from the landscape, by superimposing a fabric of colours of the endemic (but now destroyed) Temperate Grassland Habitat onto the building. 

The Concrete (And Its Transformation) 

The Between Mountains mural, a seven-storey high painting in a Canberra apartment building, had its genesis in the Brutal Transformation project. 

In both the speculative Brutal Transformations works on paper, and the actual 440sqm mural, colour of place is recollected, and represented as a transformative agent, bringing people and buildings into new relationships with country.  

A hybrid practice operating between art and architecture, Lymesmith is first and foremost about painting and colour within, for, and in response to buildings.  

“The paintings I make are mostly large-scale works (murals) for buildings, or they are literally painted and decorated buildings – colour designs and interventions for building interiors and exteriors. It’s still a painting practice, but it’s a painting practice expanded into the built environment, and away from the gallery. There are three distinct but overlapping aspects of my practice: colour design for the built environment, site specific artworks for the built environment, and painting. All three aspects coexist and nourish each other. Research and advocacy for the intelligent and human centred use of colour in the built environment is part of this work,” says COX Gallery Artist, Lymesmith.  

Lymesmith employs colour to enhance connection to place; to amplify or camouflage built form; to signify cultural and historical connections; to reinforce way-finding strategies; to create new identities and regenerate places in transition.  

Above: COX Gallery Artist, Lymesmith 

Recollected Colour is part of the Craft + Design Canberra Festival and will be shown at the COX Gallery. 

When: 4 November – 6 December, with the gallery open 9am-5pm
Where: The COX Gallery is located at 1/19 Eastlake Parade, Kingston, ACT 

Photography credit: Dale Wowk, Sonia van de Haar, Callie Marshall 

Lisa DeSantis