Yevgeniya Baras presents her first Australian exhibition Invisible Line, with a series of her lovingly constructed canvases, which flirt between abstraction and figuration.

Process and labour are integral to Baras, who works on several paintings at once, often spending several years on each piece before releasing it into the world. The surfaces are built up in accumulated layers of mark making, with found and foraged substances incorporated into oil paint. Materials including wood, paper pulp, and objects from her life including personal talismans or items of old clothing and bed sheets are embedded into the surface, building up the landscape of the painting and creating an archaeology of personal histories.

The artist describes the process of building these unique, raised surfaces as ‘drawing in relief’. She plays up the three-dimensionality of her paintings by working on both front and back of the surface. Visually, the tightly composed surfaces contain a highly personal language of symbols and shapes. Cyrillic and Latin lettering is often scattered throughout the composition, occasionally spelling out words in cryptic messages – a form of Concrete Poetry – or used in a purely formal manner. Together, the forms are at times suggestive of landscapes, cityscapes or celestial maps, but are at other times inscrutable. The resulting paintings, intricate and often intimately scaled, invite close investigation, as though the viewer is required to excavate and uncover secrets of time.