IT almost sounds like a fairytale: an artist arrives at a small fishing village in a dark, far-off land, and encounters two eccentric scientists who welcome her into their shelter where she finds true love.
But the story of Carmel Seymour’s residency in Iceland is fittingly enchanting, given her fantastic and dreamy artworks which are appearing at the Helen Gory Galerie this month.
“I thought I’d make a show inspired by the Icelandic landscape,’’ she says. ‘‘But I was spending all this time inside because it was winter and I started making all this work about house plants; having a higher experience of nature while trapped inside the house.
“Lots of the work is of me trying to get that same sense of wonder you experience when you face the big Icelandic landscape – it’s like a fairyland.”
Working daily meant Seymour would often miss the mere four hours of daylight, arriving at and leaving her studio in the dark. With the scientists who shared the space often out, the artist admits it was a very different experience.
“It’s not depressing but everyone just gets a bit introverted,” she says. “I was a bit flat and low-energy.”
But this melancholy seems to have made her work all the more interesting. With watercolour galaxies (“I love science documentaries even though I don’t understand them”), landscapes that seem to bleed greens and blues into the air and mysterious figures who perform mundane tasks in the least mundane of backdrops, Seymour creates paintings which recall a kind of high art children’s book illustration.
The VCA graduate says that, try as she might to experiment, her love of storytelling and detailed drawing keeps pulling her back to an illustrative style.
“Sometimes I think it would be great to be a bit looser, but then I start doing the detail on someone’s dress or the hair strands … and there I am!”
Carmel Seymour Feels Lichen Home at Helen Gory Galerie, 25 St Edmonds Road, Prahran. May 30 – June 23.
