Kendal Heyes 03 - 26 April 2025

Memory of a Tree

and other works

about Time

These works are about consciousness and time. I’m interested in how time structures perception, consciousness and memory. The way we apprehend the world is never a mechanical movement from one perception to another: at the same time as perceiving any particular place or object we might also be thinking of something else or someplace else and that thought or memory can lead to endless digressions to other places, objects and relations.

The multi-image work Detours is about how driving through a landscape I may think of my destination or a similar landscape, which evokes a memory of a person or experience, a conversation or something I’ve read or some apparently unrelated thought or memory. I’ve always liked the way in Tristram Shandy Lawrence Sterne apologises for his endless digressions and then continues with more.

These works are pyrographs, made using a laser cutter to burn images into watercolour paper. The first images were details of ink drawings I was working on, which unlocked the possibility to create a narrative of fragments from details of a single drawing. The unifying effect of the pyrographic process allows for the inclusion of photographic elements including images of text and illustrations.

The title Memory of a Tree is deliberately ambiguous: it leaves open whether it’s someone trying to reconstruct the tree though memory fragments, or the tree remembering itself at different times, or the depiction of events that took place in or beneath the tree: Memory of a Tree I includes photographs of the leafless tree in winter within the drawn tree in summer; Memory of a Tree II takes the pyrographic process further, combining the tree image with a half-tone image made from holes burned through the paper. KH 2025

Kendal Heyes was born in New Zealand, moved to Sydney in 1980, and now lives and works in Coledale on the Illawarra coast. His work covers a range of mediums including photography, drawing, printmaking and painting. He has held more than 50 solo exhibitions since the 1980s.

Kendal was awarded the Post-graduate Tim Olsen Prize for Excellence in Drawing (2010) and the Adelaide Perry Drawing Prize (2017), has held residencies at Nelson Polytechnic and Otago University (Frances Hodgkins Fellowship) in New Zealand, Sydney Grammar School in Australia and Cumbria in the UK. His work has been included in Australian Printmaking: from Pre-settlement to Present (National Gallery of Australia), Australian Photography: the 'Eighties, (NGA), Perspecta, (Art Gallery of NSW), A Very Peculiar Practice: Recent Currents in New Zealand Painting (City Gallery, Wellington), and Bright Paradise: The 1st Auckland Triennial (Auckland Art Gallery), among other major survey exhibitions in both countries.

Kendal is represented in many public collections including Adam Art Gallery at Victoria University, Massey University, the Hocken Collection at the University of Otago in New Zealand, and the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of South Australia and the Art Gallery of NSW in Australia.