From the forest celebrates the art and life of Ruth Burgess, who has had a career spanning three decades and is widely regarded as a leading force in Australian printmaking as an artist, teacher and mentor. With her home and studio immersed in a verdant rainforest in Turramurra on Sydney’s northshore, the enduring themes evident within her work are the spirituality and the immediacy of her bush environment and the interconnectedness of man and nature.

Ruth Burgess’s first visit to China in 1988 proved an artistic and spiritual revelation and her life and practice has been profoundly influenced by China’s paintings, calligraphy and Buddhism ever since. While her artworks share many of the aesthetic qualities of Chinese and Japanese woodcut traditions, Burgess’s works have a distinctly Australian sensibility and a visual iconography developed through living with such proximity to the Australian bush, its flora and fauna.

Ruth Burgess’s art practice stands apart from her peers through her intensely original, distinctive and compelling woodcuts and the palpable sense of unfettered energy they contain. Together the artworks in this exhibition reveal the artist’s continuing journey through landscape, figuration and abstraction and the marriage of process and material in her work.

Media

• The allure of woodcuts and engravings: Ruth Burgess retrospective – Linda Mottram, ABC Sydney, 6 May 2013