India Mark: Ngununggula

We are delighted to announce that Dharawal/Wollongong-based contemporary painter INDIA MARK is exhibiting alongside six other esteemed Australian female artists in the Ngununggula Southern Highlands Regional Gallery show ‘Tender’. This significant showing comes following her feature in the April issue of Belle magazine – an accolade that attests to the growing acclaim of the artist.

“Writing a second chapter in Ngununggula’s series celebrating Australian women artists, ‘Tender’ explores the soft power of the title’s emotional register, its notions of care and significance beyond a gendered lens,” reflects Belle’s news piece on the show, which opened at the Ngununggula in Bowral on 12 April.

“India Mark’s exquisitely composed, richly detailed and intimately scaled still-life paintings balance elegant restraint with a quiet intensity expressed via fiery underpainting.”

The term ‘tender’ conjures notions of care and femininity. We associate tenderness with the body, our gestures, and emotional expression. We also assign the term to places, objects and surfaces – to describe how they arouse our senses or yield under touch, softening or giving way.

Yet with its layered meanings, ‘Tender’ seeks to examine the concept of tenderness not through a gendered lens, but as an intrinsically human quality – woven into the body and lived experience– through the distinctive practices of these seven leading female voices in the Australian contemporary art scene.

Celebrating the alchemy of things artfully arranged, serendipitously set together, Mark curates a visually charged set of immortalised objects. Mark recently exhibited at our Berrima gallery in the group exhibition ‘A Celebration of the Still’ – a vibrant and richly varied paean to the genre’s enduring vitality and its power to instil objects with life, storytelling and small moments of grace.

All works from Mark’s painterly contribution to ‘Tender’ are available to acquire by request in our Southern Highlands gallery or online.