ARIELLA FRIEND
ARIELLA FRIEND
Distorted Landscape
28 August to 15 September 2024
Biography
Ariella Friend is a multidisciplinary artist working in an expanded field between painting, sculpture and installation. Friend’s practice investigates the relationships humans have with the natural world and the spaces that exist between the virtual and physical worlds. Her work combines every day materials such as found timber, and paper with the traditional artist techniques of painting and glueing to create works that exist in the gap between fiction and reality.
Ariella Friend holds a Master of Art (Sculpture, Performance, Installation) with Excellence from UNSW Art & Design and a Bachelor of Design (Visual Communication) with Honours from UTS, Sydney.
Friend has been selected as a finalist in numerous awards including ‘National Emerging Art Prize’, ‘Grace Cossington Smith Art Award’ ,‘Omnia Art Prize’, ‘North Sydney Art Prize‘ (Winner of the Works On/With Paper Prize), ‘Ravenswood Australian Womens’ Art Prize’, ‘Gosford Art Prize’, ‘Environmental Art & Design Prize’, ‘Meroogal Womens’ Art Prize‘ and ‘Fisher’s Ghost Art Award’. Selected group exhibitions include, ‘Beechworth Biennale’, Beechworth, Victoria, ‘Tree’, Climeart, Fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne, ‘Women and the Landscape’, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, ‘Plants’, Lion Gate Lodge, Botanical Gardens, Sydney and ‘Friends and Family’, Daine Singer, Melbourne. She is also a featured artist in the 2024 Sculpture by the Sea exhibition.
Solo exhibitions include ‘Zoom In, Zoom Out‘, Woollahra Gallery At Redleaf, Sydney and ‘Not All Is Lost’, Airspace Projects, Sydney.
Her work is held in the Macquarie Group Collection, UNSW Alumni Women’s Collection and private collections both nationally and internationally.
Exhibition Statement
This exhibition ‘Distorted Landscape’ presents a new body of work in which Ariella Friend further explores her relationship to nature in a digital world. Having never visited Tamworth, Friend’s interpretation of the local flora and natural landscapes is based on her text based prompts and image searches on the internet. This research has culminated in ‘expanded paintings’ that are inspired by the local trees, flowers and waterways of Tamworth yet feel strangely unfamiliar. “By zooming in and out of digital imagery I reduce the landscape into a series of pixels and colour blocks that are then interpreted into abstract, sculptural works”.
By combining layers of found, imperfect timber that have been cut and sanded to size by the artist, with a nature inspired colour palette this new body of work further explores Friend’s interest in materiality and the process of making.
Just like the Italian Arte Povera Movement from the late 1960s to 1970s whose artists explored a range of unconventional processes and combined them with every day materials,‘ ‘Distorted Landscape’ reflects Friend’s playful and experimental approach to non objective art making while challenging the viewers’ perception of what a landscape painting could be.