IN THE GALLERY: Anito of the Forest

Olivia Chin

2 - 24 May 2025

‘The city gives the illusion that earth does not exist’ – Robert Smithson

This collection of paintings quietly examines our relationship with energy across several forms – our life force, soul needs, and the resources we extract. Through observation and reverence for the natural world, the work draws on thinkers like Elisabeth Grosz and Robert Smithson, alongside Filipino folklore, questioning our position ‘on earth’, at the boundary between human intervention and natural process.

These works continue Chin’s ongoing love affair with the Australian landscape. An avid hiker, camper, climber, and outdoor sketcher, Chin’s paintings capture the rugged and diverse habitats known well to Victorians – Wilsons Promontory, The Grampians, and Ocean Grove, to name a few.

The works emerge from a practice of listening rather than thinking. They record a non-conversation with landscapes, responding to their bumps, ridges, and valleys as living environments that resonate with our inner states. Bold colours and gestural marks trace spirit against empty sections of linen, capturing moments where freedom and compulsion meet. Like geological strata, personal memory sediments into each piece, as they travel out of Chin’s sketchbook and are painted in her Brunswick studio.

Viewers are invited to consider their connection to place and energy – how we navigate between productivity and rest, consumption and conservation, remembering that we are not separate from the earth but integral to it.

Exhibition Opening: Saturday 03 May | 2 – 4pm

Please email info@thisisnofantasy.com for an exhibition catalogue