Colour & Collage

Images of Balmain and Rozelle
by Chloë Waddell
Art Gallery on Darling: 307 Darling St Balmain
1st to 5th May 2024, 10am to 5pm each day

Colour & Collage is Chloë Waddell’s third exhibition based on the streets of Balmain.
“A never-ending source of inspiration, a wander through these streets shows new little gems of inspiration at every turn. with interesting buildings and trees around every corner.”

Chloë begun her artistic career in Rozelle at the previous campus of Sydney College of the Arts at Callan Park whilst living down the road in Balmain. Having been a resident of Brisbane for the past 9 1/2 years, returning to Balmain to exhibit her work of the local streets, represents a coming home for Chloë. She has also explored these streets in two previous exhibitions at Art Gallery on Darling in 2018 and 2022.

It has been 12 years since Chloë first started her cityscape series, capturing the essence of the places she has travelled and exhibited. Starting as an exploration of Manhattan’s architecture, this series now includes hundreds of artworks from around the world: Berlin, Montreal, London, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Canberra.

These artworks all begin in the same way, wandering the streets with a camera, capturing the interesting corners and collections of angles, putting together compositions of lines, shapes and colour.
Back in the studio, these photos are transformed into multilayered pieces, Chloë traces the important lines of the photos, adds watercolour, acrylic paint and collage finishing the artwork with a coat of resin which both soaks into and surrounds the artwork, protecting and encasing it.

Alongside her collection of mixed media wall pieces, Chloë has created a range of jewellery describing the local streets: a series of portraits of buildings and trees hand drawn onto plywood and matched with handmade sterling silver frames. Her odd pairs of earrings are a signature for Chloë where the picture begins on one earring and carries across to the next.