In her latest body of work, PAUSE, Ana Young offers a slow and quiet counterpoint to the frenetic pace of contemporary life. Through a process of transmutation, the artist moves beyond her own afflictions, transforming them into a place of quiet, sensorial respite. This offering is also a provocation – one that asks us to look beyond the paintings’ surface and step into the worlds they contain.
Young draws upon time spent in the Australian bush, where time itself feels held and delayed. Her paintings emerge from the experience of being in the landscape, yet they are not mimetic representations of it. Rather, they are a later response – a compilation of spaces entered, and sounds remembered from her encounters with the natural world. “I do not interpret the landscape as seen,” says Young. “Rather, I interpret what the landscape allows me to feel in a particular moment.” For Young, colour and shape carry the weight of human experience, memory, and the subconscious through which traces of the landscape resurface, finding their way back onto the canvas.
For Young, painting becomes an act of reclaiming slowness, forging a contemplative space in which to question, to find momentary reprieve, and to give form to fleeting fragments of time. “It is my wish that this body of work can communicate and share the silence, an invitation to step out of the present every day, and to simply pause.”
Ana Young’s practice explores constructs of time and memory within moments of silence. Drawing inspiration from the Australian bush, her paintings emerge as contemplative responses rather than literal depictions, transforming lived experience into abstraction. Young begins with en plein air sketches of the landscape before returning to her Sydney studio where she translates these ephemeral moments through her distinct visual language onto the canvas. Having lived across the world, Young finds the continual changes of nature to be her most compelling subject. Through her work, colour and shape carry traces of emotion and memory, inviting the viewer to slow down and enter a space where time feels suspended.
© Text and Photo Courtesy of Curatorial & Co
