Bec Juniper

What is Western Australia’s environmental relationship to water? This exploration is presented in Sui, an expansive exhibition at Fox Galleries of the celebrated topographical field paintings from Perth-based artist Bec Juniper.

Juniper’s large-scale paintings are brimming with emotional power and luminescence; their rich surfaces connect an inner emotion with the greater environment. The works featured in ‘Sui’ capture the undulations and formations of Western Australia as Juniper uses minerals and pigments from clay deposits to depict her aerial landscapes, layering the natural materials to create evocative vistas. Reminiscent of Robert Smithson’s statement that “nature is never finished”, Juniper’s interest in science and geology engages the viewer to explore and experience the duelling strength and fragility of the landscapes that lie under our oceans.

‘Sui’ takes its name from the Japanese element of water: the character sui also encompasses a larger philosophical definition by covering all that is fluid and formless in our world. It is a force of change that provokes our profound emotional response to shifting natural scenes.

Water follows water as a metaphor for thought but also as an act.
For as long as I can remember, I have felt connected to the land, and I express my love for nature through painting. The longer I do it the more I observe and relax into the ways of physics, where making remains dynamic and fragile, revealing itself constantly.

There is such a richness of narrative in the earth, in elements and natural occurrences, such as the travel of water; as a shaper and the micro macro world of morphology. The paintings are created through multiple fluid layers with each layer containing fragments and traces of passage which combine the present with the past; acts of nature in an attempt to give agency and authenticity to the subject.

In these imagined works I have constructed many alternative versions of places and events, recognising on some level, that they are both fanciful, and open to interpretation. Multiple temporalities are rendered over time without a set path.

I often think of my work as a struggle between abstraction and reality because both exist within. Nature and physics are co-creators of the work, as an elemental and dynamic entity, and is not just an external subject, there is a constant co-constructing of the surface which is active, I’m trying to impart a feeling for place via an exploration of painting within a set of memories, tools and processes.

– Bec Juniper