“Untitled” by Andree van Schaik

At first, my thought suggested by the Fire Escape Gallery was transformation. Transforming the self through creation. But then it turned to the constant transformation and focused on fire. In this collage, the Fire Escape Gallery’s 10th birthday is celebrated with fire as flowers, and the focus of fire in its ethos is in the reading of a newspaper. This collage captures a moment in shadow and the light of the fire. For the Fire Escape Gallery the fire of creation is a constant underlying given, and so here, caught between the wind-swept folds of flowered fabric and a raised newspaper, cut into each other, is the juxtaposition between news, read in the light in a spare moment, and flowers in flame under the sky. Flames of flowers: the center of the movement. What is fire? Light, combustion, energy, synthesis, movement yet stillness. Collage is captured process, the fire of creation, therefore movement while at the same time always arrival.

Stuck down, crossed with another, more still, aperture: The pause and concentration of reading a newspaper could be the stillness of fire’s concentration and is part of the actual metamorphosis of burning. This echoes this gallery of emotional intelligence. 

BIO. Andrée van Schaik is an artist who lives and works in Melbourne where she has been painting, drawing, writing and composing music since the mid-1990s. Her paintings are a marker of where she is and has been, at certain emotional points in time. Expressed through rearranged found imagery, her work seeks to echo the lightness, depth, and strange infinity of her world.

Interested on buying? More info under request at hello@fireescape.art