Exhibition Venue: Hive Tasmania, 50 Main Street, Ulverstone 7315

Hive Tasmania is pleased to present “Big Small Worlds”, an exhibition of work by artists who place a lens on those hidden worlds found in Tasmania’s deep waters, the oldest of its forests and secret places in between. Helene Boyer, Christie Lange, Sarah Lloyd OAM, Nataša Milenović, Anne Morrison, Emily-Rose Wills and poet Kristen Lang bring into focus the magical, vibrantly coloured and mysterious life-forms: slime moulds, nudibranchs, seaweeds, mosses, fungi, lichens, pollen and seeds. Their size belies their impact on our world in maintaining the health and biodiversity of our ecosystems.

This is Big Small Worlds – Emily-Rose Wills edition:
This body of work explores remembered landscapes through abstract and intuitive mark-making, evoking the essence of memory. It holds a sense of environment rather than offering a direct representation.

The coastline of the Bass Strait, the depths of the ocean, coastal scrub, and native forest inform the work, not as literal depictions, but as impressions that surface through gesture, texture and form. The work draws on these environments without attempting to describe them. Forms may suggest terrain, growth, or ecological systems, yet avoid fixed interpretation.

Each work operates as a self-contained world, as though it has fallen from the mind onto paper. Nothing is mapped or pre-considered. Each piece unfolds without a predetermined outcome, with the final image only becoming clear as it resolves. This way of working opens into an ongoing interest in layered realities, in the idea of worlds within worlds.

What appears small may hold something vast. What seems expansive may be contained within something minute. A single surface can suggest something immense, as though entire worlds might exist within the smallest fragment or atom.
The works act as portals to imagined landscapes, where the unconscious mind weaves memory into tangible expressions. This meditative and expansive process invites viewers to immerse themselves in microcosmic realms, offering a contemplative space to explore the infinite. A sustained state of flow is central to the process; without it, the work remains incomplete.