Between Appearances: The art of Louise Weaver

Featuring fantastical creatures, iridescent other worlds, uncanny objects and unsettling organic forms Between appearances: the art of Louise Weaver explores the multidisciplinary practice of one of Australia’s most significant contemporary artists.

While Weaver is best known for her whimsical, thought-provoking sculptures of animals, Between appearances features more than 100 works in an array of media including sculptural installations, paintings, drawings, printmaking, collage, textiles, movement and sound. The exhibition spans three decades of the artist’s practice and reveals Weaver’s longstanding interests in fields as diverse as visual culture, art history, natural history, science and design.

Absorbed in particular by the dynamics and fragility of the natural world and environmental concerns, Weaver has a fascination with cycles of growth, metamorphosis and the intricacies of camouflage. Her work plays with these concepts and extends them into ideas surrounding artificiality and transformation, social themes and feminism, underpinned by the enduring power of mythology, make-believe and memory.

Curated by Melissa Keys Between appearances unfolds across all four of the galleries at Buxton Contemporary. It traces her gradual shift from early figurative forms and compositions through to abstract paintings, objects and sound environments, comprising an overview of Weaver’s richly imaginative, critical and compelling work from the early nineties through to the present.

Louise Weaver, Taking a Chance on Love 2003 (detail), The University of Melbourne Art Collection, Michael Buxton Collection, Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Michael and Janet Buxton 2018