"5 Baths a Day in Shades of Paynes Grey"

Nikky Morgan Smith presents a series of delightful and amusing paintings in a combination of raw and worked surface, colour and expressive line.  Nikky is wrestling with the ideas of ambiguity - absence or presence, reality or imaginings - and a state of overwhelm, expressed through the symbol of overflowing waters. The inability to constrain emotion is suggested by the overflowing bath. But does this emotional release provide respite, or does it on the contrary lead to ever-deeper waters? Waving or drowning…. These are questions posed by Nikky’s paintings.

Nikky Morgan Smith has grown up surrounded by art.  Her father, John Smith is a senior lecturer at the School of Arts at the Southern Cross University and her mother is Shelagh Morgan, a well respected print maker and mixed media artist.

But Nikky is already making her own mark in the art world, with successful exhibitions in Brisbane and Melbourne under her belt.

Her abandoned tricycles, ghost birds, rain and bathtubs are a visual poetry that seems at first glance witty and whimsical, but mask a more difficult, unsettling story.

5 Baths a Day in Shades of Paynes Grey opens at the Art Piece Gallery with a preview evening at 6pm on Friday 22 May and runs until Friday 5 June 2009

View Nikky Morgan Smith's exhibition gallery online