With Tomorrow — Astrid Elouise Bell

With Tomorrow

Pearl Smith
Elisabeth Sulich
Astrid Bell

This show brings together works by three Sydney based painters, who are all around the same age and move within the same worlds. Because of this proximity, it is easy to find a common thread running through their practices and paintings. Though there are commonalities in subject and their material treatments we are still able to note the quiet intricacies and poetic ambiguities of each artist’s work respectively. Together they observe a similar world, but are contemplating it at varying and unique speeds, positions and with different methods of processing the information that falls around them.

The decision to represent certain information through painting can be deliberate, but it is often mysterious. Feeling compelled to turn a precious sight into a painting is to attempt to understand it- it is for the same reason that we take photographs, or bookmark a page, so that we may refer back to an image of the world that invokes a thought or a feeling or a memory. To turn something into painting is an invitation for subjectivity, and a turn away from the literal- inventing a new vision. In any depiction there is a certain removal of context and origin, and the infinite potential to forge new paths of seeing, thinking about what we see, and imagining. In the work of these three artists, the act of describing involves the reverse- undoing, removing, withholding, isolating. From this there is an opening up, and a sense of freedom.

Astrid Bell, Pearl Smith and Elisabeth Sulich are a natural grouping. There is something contained in the works of these painters that pertains to the wonder and slipperiness of perception- how the clarity of something is compromised in fading memory, the tentativeness of media over-saturation, vague archives and the subjectivity of history. But perhaps most importantly, the ability of paint to both realise an image and generate an ambiguity. This is achieved in the way that the artists isolate people, objects or scenes from a context, but also in the way in which they obviate and play with material. There is a dreamlike and other-worldly quality to this work - like pictures made by someone who is outside of earth, making curious observations.

With tomorrow is the title of a song by Gene Clark that was then covered by This Mortal Coil.

Text by Clare Wigney
Images by Sarah R. Serfati

In the still of the night
Oil on linen
2025
(Centre painting)

In thin air
Oil on linen
2025