Shoufay Derz’s elegant, philosophically and psychologically complex installation of sculpture, video and photography developed from the artist’s participation in the Hill End Artist in Residence Program in 2015. Absence, abandonment, emptiness and loss – and ways to make such abstract concepts visible – are a focus of the artist’s practice.

Curated by Sarah Gurich, the exhibition runs from 1 April until 8 May 2016.

Absence, abandonment, emptiness and loss – and ways to make such abstract concepts visible, have long been a focus of Shoufay Derz’s practice. She conjures with the expression of seeming intangibles, with stages of transition and transformation as she interweaves her own personal narrative and experience to make manifest universal aspirations, fears and quests for meaning.

The landscape as metaphor pervades her works. Vast, harsh, empty expanses of isolated far flung monotone deserts, craggy abandoned cavernous quarries, and deep, dark, dense bottomless black lakes are all allegorical sites for her expression of wildernesses of the soul.

The Wish suites of photographic images herald a shift from bleak emptiness to a more ‘optimistic’ and transitional landscape with ‘communal’ stands of sentinel Eucalypts signalling a closer intimacy with nature. Light filters through the trees. The palette, while subdued is tinged with warmth. Though trunks are seared and blackened by bushfire, sprouts of new growth augur of endurance and promise of regeneration, of life.