OPENING EVENT: Wednesday, 5 November, 5.30-7.30pm

Georgia Arnold presents a new body of work created primarily during her time house (and pet) sitting at her dad’s place in Pukekohe. Temporarily moving back to the Franklin area where she grew up, Arnold draws inspiration from her semi-rural surroundings, changing family dynamics, new routines, and small everyday experiences.

‘Retreat’ lives in the escapism of both dealing with conflict and healing. As a verb to ‘Retreat’ is to withdraw, to move back. As a noun a ‘Retreat’ is a secluded place for restoration and relaxation.

Unlike paintings on stretched canvas, Arnold’s canvas works seem to withdraw from their frames back into drawings. Their edges are raw and exposed, wavy borders of trapped tension that are tacked to the board beneath.

Methods of presentation often reference the process of making the works and incorporate a studio logic of temporary fixture, where the possibility of being untacked, rearranged, or otherwise is retained.

Georgia Arnold is a multidisciplinary artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. She works intuitively across a range of mediums including drawings, ceramics, painting, metalwork, and sculpture.  She situates her rambling practice in the field of expanded drawing. Her work investigates the messy potential of autobiography and explores the playful tension between depicting imagery and the range of expressive mark making her materials offer.

Arnold employs surrealist techniques of automatism and mind-wandering to 'carve out' imagery that explores memories, ambiguous figure / field relationships, networks and plant and human entanglements. Experimenting with turning up or down her conscious control while drawing, she makes space for impulses of the subconscious and that of her materials. She sees her practice as a way to connect herself and the world, creating work that is both diaristic and imaginative.

Georgia Arnold completed her Master in Fine Arts at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland in 2023. Her recent projects and solo exhibitions include What ever will grow (Mural Commission for South British Insurance Company Ltd Building Art Project, 2024) Diamond - Circle - Rectangle (Corban Estate Arts Centre, 2024) and Dizziness & Drawing Breath (Papakura Art Gallery, 2024). Arnold has also shown as part of group presentations including Secret Life of Plants (Melanie Roger Gallery, 2024), Luff (The Arts House Trust, 2023), The wonder of small things (Franklin Art Gallery, 2023) and Screaming Waterfall (Jhana Millers Gallery, 2022).

‘Retreat’ is her first solo exhibition with Melanie Roger Gallery.