Magic Mountain features four artists from the same family, Clairy Laurence and Monica Usher are third generation artists and sisters, David Usher is a painter and ceramicist who is married to Monica, and Libby Usher is a ceramicist and their daughter, a fourth-generation artist. The works in this exhibition link these four artists and family members together and illustrates the diverse nature of the artists practices, each with an interest in finding new ways of understanding the metaphysical nature of the world around them.
Usher’s paintings on canvas and on his wheel-thrown ceramic works embody the notion of the Spook. Usher explains, ‘the Spook occurs in an artwork through the culmination of a series of elements - of the application of composition, colour and light... The artist develops an intuitive awareness or knowledge about their arts practice to gain a sense of the overall feeling of the work in front of them, to ascertain whether the composition, or ‘feel’ of the work has reached the moment when it has a kind of magic about it.’ Usher’s work captures the essence, or emotion within a landscape, and in doing so, embodies the feeling or experience of the Spook.
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