Drone aerial view of the oldest tea plantation in Europe at Gorreana farm field in Sao Miguel sland, Azores, Portugal.

Page Galleries presents a suite of new works from Elizabeth Thomson. Alongside these features Thomson’s remarkable Snake River (2004/2019), consisting of approximately 500 cast bronze hand-painted Horoeka (Lancewood) leaves installed directly onto the wall of the gallery.

In the opening lines of text to accompany the exhibition, Thomson’s longtime friend and collaborator Gregory O’Brien writes:

A ‘habitable zone’ might be a likeable, livable space—an agreeable domestic environment, quite possibly—yet, in planetary terms, the meaning of the phrase is more specific: It is the distance from a star at which it is possible for liquid water to exist on the surface of an orbiting planet. Elizabeth Thomson’s art exists in the universe-sized space between these two meanings—between the quotidian and the cosmic.

The works that make up Lateral Series; Habitable Zones’ trace patterns of life in the accustomed ‘habitable zone’ of Planet Earth. They track a number of journeys through this territory, taking their inspiration from the movement of a river or pathway through a landscape, a plantation of trees across rolling hillcountry, and the furrows laid into cultivated land. Thinking laterally—as Thomson’s works insist we do—we also recognize in these new works the minute patterning of leaf and cellular structures, as well as echoes of the human body, of fabrics and woven materials. The movement of a comb through the hair of the beloved.

Opening night: Thursday 11 Aug, 5 – 7pm