TROY RUFFELS: BETWEEN FIRE AND FLOOD

2 September – 22 October, 2017
Opening Friday 1 September, 6 pm 

Between Fire and Flood
Troy Ruffels: Solo Commission

Each year the Devonport Regional Gallery presents an exhibition of works by a mid-career Tasmanian artist. The 2017 Solo Commission was awarded to North West artist Troy Ruffels and provided him with support to research and create a new body of work.

Working with photo-media Troy has produced a poignant body of work for this commission that references the recent extreme weather events experienced here on the North West Coast, including the fires of summer 2016 and the floods that followed that winter and explores our relationship to the world through landscape, and our contemporary concerns about climate, nature and culture.  On entering the exhibition viewers will be given the opportunity to enter a world where landscape is used as a subject through which to navigate emotional states of being and our relationship to the environment at large.

“In the studio, and in the 12 month development of the exhibition my focus often shifted to the use, qualities and attributes of light and emotive tone, and how through finding visual equivalents for often elusive states, I could translate the qualities of harmony and discord, weight and gravity, solace and conflict, and the poetics of human endeavour into visual form,” says Troy. “The challenge was to synthesize and distil the details, textures and qualities I observe and experience in an environment with a suitable layering of photographic and mark making techniques employed”.

Image credit: Troy Ruffels, The bone gardens, 2017, digital print on composite aluminium sheet. Courtesy of the artist and Bett Gallery.