Lottie Consalvo
Lottie Consalvo’s art practice attempts to make manifest formative and generative powers of the mind. Working across painting, performance, video and sculpture, Consalvo connects deep internal states of being with finely attuned sensory perception and expression.
Accessing primal states of imagination, dreams, and the mosaic of memory, paintings provide haptic evidence of energetic psychological and emotional states. As much about force as form, these abstract works are murky and nervous. Layers are built up through an architecture that promises to open passages and reveal glimpses, or close off, conceal and deny, or both. This is Consalvo’s fascination with an inner world of an archetypal unconscious – a centre that can’t be controlled or readily accessed, while it nevertheless deeply informs life’s unfolding journey.
The painting itself is free, gestural and open-ended, expressing tensions between body and mind, between lived and processed experience, and bypassing representation with a musical immediacy. The works have an inner reverence, a monumentality that pays tribute to the mind’s incredible capacity for invention and renewal – our ability to survive experiences of loss, trauma, grief, to bear the unbearable, and to interweave time past and time future into a sensible universe.
Originally from Melbourne and born in Sale, Victoria in 1985, Lottie Consalvo lives in Newcastle. Her work has been exhibited across Australia and internationally, including New Zealand, Mexico and Germany. Exhibitions include: Millerntor Gallery#5, Hamburg, curated by Fabian Jentschin, 2015; In The Remembering, Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2018; and in the fourth Clayton Utz Partnership exhibition, Melbourne 2019. Consalvo has worked with Kaldor Public Art Projects, Sydney, including a performance-based residency with Marina Abramovic in 2015. Her work is held in a number of collections including Artbank, Macquarie University, Allens law firm, The Stevenson Collection and Warner Music Australia.
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