Visual Art/ Al Munro, After Barcelona. Wendy Teakel, Entanglement. Claire Fletcher, All Eyes on Me. Civic Art Bureau. Until October 4. Reviewed by KERRY-ANNE COUSINS

Al Munro and Wendy Teakel are two well established Canberra artists.

Claire Fletcher is a younger artist who has recently graduated with a Bachelor of Visual Arts from the ANU. In 2025 she participated in a year long residency at Megalo Print Studio as part of the ANU Emerging Artist Support Scheme. Since graduating she has built up an impressive record of involvement in group exhibitions and not for profit art organisations

Al Munro has always been an inventive artist working with various media exploring colour, pattern, geometry and space during her long art practice. In this exhibition she uses acrylic paint on constructed cardboard to make her colourful sculptural forms. These forms are the outcome of a residency at casa RARO in Barcelona where the artist was inspired by the architectural details of its fin de siècle architecture. In particular Antoni Gaudi’s use of catenary curves – the shape made when a chain is suspended from two points.

The large work called, After Barcelona, is the most impressive of these abstract works. Its small sculptural forms like architectural molding are arranged in a free-flowing group across the gallery wall. They express the decorative exuberance of Barcelona’s architecture in a playful way enhanced by the colourful but moderated colour scheme.

Wendy Teakel’s works continue her involvement with the landscape in all its forms both natural and manmade. Glass Matrix is a small work that brings together two viewpoints – the distant line of burnt trees on the horizon as well as the lines of plants in the forefront of the space.

In two works Summer Paddock and Winter Paddock the small detritus of nature – the leaves, sticks, and twigs are delineated by poker work that burns their images into the birchwood panels.  Always sensitive to mark-making and the connection with the small scale of nature as well as to the distant vista, Teakel’s works sing of the earth.

Claire Fletcher’s work, All eyes on me, occupies a large window opening on the street downstairs. In a quadriptych made up of four canvases linked by an interlocking wormhole or passage, it is a mesmerizing abstract exploration of shifting degrees of space and perspective. Fletcher demonstrates a remarkable degree of skill and maturity in this complex and ambitious work. It will be interesting to see what the artist achieves in the future.

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