Mount Horrocks Wines is currently host to the work of emerging artist, and Helpmann Academy award winner Charlotte Treloar until 31 August.
Ms Treloar was the recipient of a $5000 grant donated by Mount Horrocks Wines through the Helpmann Academy for Emerging Artists Grants 2025.
Part of this cash grant was the opportunity to show her works in an exhibition at Mount Horrocks Cellar Door. Ms Treloar is an emerging artist based on Peramangk Country in Echunga.
Investigating how impermanence, belief, culture and perspectives on reality inform identity and aids in orienting herself in the world through use of photography, film, painting, printmaking and performance, Ms Treloar’s work seeks to collaborate with the land to explore how the entanglement of unseen forces connects all life forms. Particularly focusing on the intersections of memory, place and body.
Ms Treloar’s exhibition, ‘Traces,’ is an interrogation of the artist in overcoming self-destructive cycles of behaviour in search for inner peace through confrontation of uncomfortable situations of grief, guilt and fear.
Utilising the prints of tunnels from the Burrowing Bark Beetle, these tracks represent invasion of the body and the paradoxical circumstances of destroying to create (death and growth).
While these beetles thrive beneath the bark of a tree under stress, Traces metaphorically symbolises the creature’s and the tree as being of the same origin (the artist’s body).
Both possess the same desire to grow peacefully but one relies on the constant energy of the other to thrive, taking advantage of their host’s weakened state. Giving power to the narrative of what succeeds or continues cycling is where the energy is spent.
Water is also a prominent medium within the work, employed for its symbolism in expression, blood, memory, body, the womb (creation) and journeys of transformation, particularly that of travelling between earth and sky (life and death).
“In search for an inner world still functioning in peace, the process of creating Traces involved conducting automatic paintings, seeking a creative antidote through collaboration with the land and body,” Ms Treloar said.
“Painting aids in shifting internal discomforts into a visual plane. When painting in a natural environment, these works reflect a similar relationship between shape, colour and composition seen in macro-photographs of moss and condensed layers of soil.
“This process revealing a gentle reminder of our body’s natural origins and the life that arises following decay and deconstruction.”
Through exploring the intersections between land, water, subconscious expressions (automatic painting) and body, Traces investigates the relationship between destruction and growth in relation to self.
Ms Treloar said the exhibition was an invaluable learning opportunity.
“I could not express more gratitude for being selected as the lucky 2025 award recipient,” she said.
