Of mouth and mind sees Braidwood-based artist Dionisia Salas explore the interplay between the physical and psychological aspects of the lived experience.

The exhibition establishes drawing as the foundational underpinning of Salas’ practice. The lines and forms created whilst drawing mine the artist’s subconscious and create physical articulations of the absurd. Salas’ energetic compositions are at once depictions of the landscape, the body and the mind. The works in the exhibition embrace wandering lines that dip in and out of figuration and abstraction.

Across paintings and drawings, the works in Of mouth and mind straddle the divide between alluring and abject. Salas’ seductive colours and sumptuous forms entice audiences, with loose and automatic mark making expressing feelings of desire, movement and ecstasy. Through veils of colour and areas of texture, the works simultaneously reveal allusions a broader spectrum of physical experiences, with fragments signifying hair, bruises, blood and breath.

Translating ideas through paint, forms bulge out of shape and colours coalesce and collapse, merging to form areas of brown and grey. Outlines begin to blur and develop fleshy, built-up muscle that alludes to the physical world. Consciousness and intellect wrestle with the unconscious and gestural; the dichotomy of mind and body are fully present, made form in a sticky mass.

Of mouth and mind is a major solo exhibition of artist Dionisia Salas. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication featuring newly commissioned texts by leading Australian arts writers.