Have you ever entered a space and felt transported? It might have been a landscape, it could have been a building. It made an impression on you, a bodily impression, a sensory impression. You take a photograph, hoping to capture that sensation. But later, when you look at it, it’s not quite right. Everything is flat. Things aren’t where you experienced them, how you experienced them, or where you still feel them to be, in the memory held in your mind and body.

Ana Young isn’t interested in pictorially representing scenes. Her paintings channel the moment of entering a space, the moment of slowing down and settling into stillness and silence, where awareness of light, volume, and spatial relationships grow. Allowing the gaze to settle into Young’s tonal works, the dense clusters of marks begin to reveal spaces between the layers. Shapes advance and recede, drawing the viewer further into the painting’s depths. The canvas expands and contracts, breathing with us despite existing within the finite confines of a stretcher.

Ana Young’s, Sentient, follows and continues an ongoing series of works around the Hawkesbury area. In this case, looking at the movement of water and light as well as shadowing caused by the dense tree line.

Says Ana of her work: “Entering – I experience a sense of slowing down, breaking down my responses to landscape. there is a moment of arrival, a multi-sensory awareness of sound, colour, movement and above silence and delay. I don’t interpret place as a depiction of a geographical entity, my aim is to process the immediacy, to record the fragility and exchange between the observed and the absorbed – a sentient response.”

Signed on back.