Looking at these new canvases by Sally Stokes I am reminded of the words by the great landscape painter John Constable: ‘We see nothing till we truly understand it.’

A place is never described by location alone. Sally Stokes understands this. Her paintings seemingly bristle with raw honesty; each gesture and daub of colour uncannily balanced and alive, and yet they dwell in a place beyond locations – ‘a place beyond me’, says Sally.

Despite the intensity of their chroma, these are slow paintings. Time itself becomes an abstraction in their making. ‘I do hundreds of drawings as I ebb my way in; memories that return months later in a dream like state … sitting with them, being distracted, pulled back in … sitting again; it’s like they exist in a third place.’

Sally will spend months on a painting; years on a show. It is a journey demanding of both connection and solace; the quick gesture and the slow memory. As the viewer we get caught in their carnival of colour but like the outback itself that overwhelms with its first impression, these paintings permeate you if you let them, lulled by the echoes of our own connections – of ‘cappuccino waterholes’ and violet watery shadows.

In a world that is over-aestheticised and racing ever-faster, ever-broader, there is a kind of pushback and pause that these paintings offer. To relegate them simply as an attempt to fit within a mythical lineage of Australian landscape painting would be a misrepresentation.

Rather, Sally speaks of ‘an age of worn out Australia mixed with new growth…surprising juxtapositions that keep changing just as you think you’ve understood them; a joy of brief connection, brief anxiety, brief love, brief despair … it’s such a tantalising knowledge, never a full picture, not a representation, but a sense of connection to this ever revealing, ever unknowable world.’

This sense of place she describes lies beyond geography, and only in that understanding do we start ‘to see’, as Constable suggests, a human sentiment in sync with the spiritual gravitas of the Australian landscape. These paintings are lived.

- Gina Fairley (National Visual Arts Journalist, ArtsHub)