The exhibition presents paintings, drawings, and prints made from 2015 to 2026 and combines significant works drawn from private collections in Taiwan with new works made specifically for this exhibition.
Chris Worfold is an Australian, Visual Artist. Born in Brisbane in 1972. He is an alumni of the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University and Queensland University of Technology – BVA, Grad Dip Ed, BA(Hons), PhD – and was a Senior lecturer at the University of Canberra / TAFE QLD.
His research and practice have investigated the confluence of analogue painting and digital imaging and he has conducted extensive inquiry into the psychoanalytic theories of C.G.Jung. He has travelled widely and has exhibited internationally in Taipei, Seoul, Paris, and New York.
Chris has visited Taiwan on numerous occasions since he first toured the county in 2009 and in collaboration with ShowArts hehas exhibited at Art Taipei and various cross-cultural exchangeexhibitions in Taiwan since 2015.
Kaleidoscope
A kaleidoscope is a children’s toy or novelty device. Viewed through one eye like a telescope, it presents us with a fractured pattern of light. Inside, it has two or more angled mirrors that reflect loose coloured objects that form endless, symmetrical, two dimensional patterns when reflected onto the lens.
The exhibition is titled Kaleidoscope metaphorically because of the idea that eastern and western cultures can mix together andreflect one another to create wonderful new and harmonious patterns. Also, much like a kaleidoscope, Chris’s work often repeats and reuses images in iterative ways. Here flowers, wings and landscapes are combined and recombined in new paintings, drawings, and prints. The flowers are symbols of growth, the wings represent freedom and transcendence, and the landscapes map physical and mental space. You can see that some of the works completed this year contain the same motifs as works that were completed a decade ago, like a kaleidoscopic dream they present us with surreal variations of forms.
As adults when we look through a kaleidoscope we are generally mildly amused and then we put it back down, but as children many of us were fascinated by it, holding it up to our eye time and time again and sharing it with others in awe. You are invited to look at the works in this exhibition with this same child’s eye, not seeking fixed meaning but exploring and sharing in wonder instead.