NATURE ABSTRACTED BY

EDDY BURGER

Exhibition dates. 5 - 16 Oct 2022
Opening Reception : Thur 6 Oct 2022, 6:00 - 8.30pm.

Nature Abstracted

Eddy Burger is a Melbourne based writer, performer and visual artist lately focused on lurid manipulated photos and surreal spontaneous line drawings. His exhibition Nature Abstracted is a collection of artworks that use nature’s natural designs to form works modern and/or abstract, comprised of his photographic abstract rock-design series and his sculptural Mallee root series.

Eddy has been photographing rock designs for decades, primarily along Victoria’s coastal regions, such as Lorne, Apollo Bay and Wye River on the Great Ocean Road. His emphasis is on the amazing designs that can be found in coastal rocks, be they on the shoreline or the cliffs, in sunlight or shade, wet, pale or dark, grey or subtlety coloured, perhaps accompanied by shells, seaweed, sand and animal tracks. Nature did much of the work so Eddy’s job was finding, isolating and cropping to create the perfect composition, accentuated by the manipulation of colour and tone. The aesthetic is of abstract art created by the natural world, yet this series varies from remaining close to the natural colours and tones, which in themselves look marvellous and remarkable, to the totally abstract, void of any semblance of rock, though their designs were created by nature.

Eddy loves playing around with tone, colour and texture using digital manipulation software, often with the intention of making something miraculous out of the ordinary, though these rock designs are far from ordinary. In a previous BlackCat exhibition he produced hundreds of variations of the same image, yet the photos in this exhibition were derived from varied images, still with some duplication but also with more closely cropped, zoomed-in versions that highlight the fact more great compositions can be found if one zooms in or out.

The sculptural component of this exhibition is Eddy’s Mallee Root series. It was created independently of his abstract rock-design series yet both emphasise miraculous beautiful designs found in nature, which eddy then emphasises, manipulates and transforms to varying degrees in order to create something remarkable and/or that looks really good. In many, the wood’s natural colour and patterns are visible, some surfaces polished or varnished, while others are painted, carved and decorated. Eddy sources his roots from firewood stores and has to clean them as well as strip them of bark, which is often shaggy and hides the roots’ remarkable shapes, textures and grain.

The Artwork