A brilliant idea wakes her. If she allows herself to sleep again, morning might reveal its shortcomings, so she leaps out of bed, drinks a coffee and starts sketching. By lunchtime she is wrestling with wood and canvas and pliers and staples and the stated drying times of acrylic gesso. It’s the afternoon now and she is roughly applying colours to the taut fabric. The curator arrives at the gallery. He tiptoes towards her, dodges a flying blob of magenta, and musters his calmest tone, “Um, what are you doing?”. It’s 35 minutes before the exhibition opens and she’s trying to start a new painting.
Reality Check is a solo exhibition of autofiction story-paint- ings by Ida Lawrence, curated by Dwi S. Wibowo. Playfully mixing images, text, patterns, and even the odd fact, Lawrence brings stories to life set in Indonesia, Australia, Germany, and beyond. Some might say the paintings aren’t very realistic; others might find fresh perspectives. What’s your take?
Let’s imagine if an exhibition is like a storybook. When you enter the gallery door, it’s like opening the first page. Where the story will begin from there, and each wall will be the next pages that attract your attention to continue reading until you reach the last page.
Reality Check is a story woven by Ida Lawrence, artist and storyteller. She will tell you her story through the paintings in this exhibition. Every time you see her paintings, you can imagine the combination of images and texts with playful colors, like a book asking you to keep opening the page to another page. Over and over, until you finally arrive at the last journey of the painting, you will under- stand how the story of this imaginary book goes.
Storytelling is an important part of Ida Lawrence’s works. As an artist, she tells stories through paintings and objects. Ida always has a unique perspective when presenting stories in each of her works. The combination of images and text in her paintings always pique the audience’s curiosity to go deeper into the storyline. At the same time, it makes them question where the stories come from.
Ida weaves her stories from daily experiences, memories, and observations of individuals or communities around her. Each place — Indonesia, Australia and Germany — also provides different experiences and stories for her. All of that ultimately forms her artistic approach as well as the characteristics in her work: style, objects, subject matter, ornaments, colours, brushstrokes, composition, language and idiom.
Every interesting and unique experience for her will be recorded first, before being processed into a work. This process can be short but can also take a long time. So, there is a time gap between the moment when the event occurs until it finally becomes a work and is exhibited to the public. This makes reality no longer the same as real-time but has changed along with her perception. Sometimes, the story changes completely, even developing into fiction.
In this exhibition, Ida wants to invite the audience to see her works from the past few years as a series of stories like in a book where each part is not separate from the other. Which is arranged with a dramatic narrative entitled “Reality Check”. Reality Check is an English idiom that shows the moment the gap closes between one’s percep- tion of reality and reality itself.
Now, you have opened the first page of a storybook woven by Ida Lawrence. When a brilliant idea wakes an artist from her sleep on the eve of an exhibition. What kind of idea? What kind of work will it become? To find out more, now is the right time to open the next page and dive into the story.
The essay written by the curator Dwi S. Wibowo.
REALITY CHECK
A solo exhibition by Ida Lawrence and curated by Dwi S. Wibowo
Purga Artspace, Jl. Bisma, Ubud, Indonesia
19 October – 15 November 2024
Open daily 7:00 – 22:00
Supported by ISA Art Gallery & Ubud Writers & Readers Festival
