Opening: Friday 12 June, 5-7pm
Dinner by Derril
Baden Croft paints in a way that gives visual language to nature’s vitality. His larger works enter your awareness slowly, then all at once, the way a landscape does when you've finally stopped moving. Something in them hums. Built up with a palette knife, not a brush in sight, just thick oil laid down with directness and conviction, they carry the energy of country experienced firsthand: rocky creek beds and river stones, snow gums catching the firelight, the deep blue stillness of a high-country lake.
On a Knife’s Edge represents a body of work that emerged from time spent in Kosciuszko National Park, camping along the Eucumbene River, fishing in the dark, and moving through the landscape at close range. What Croft found there, alongside the beauty, was a place full of introduced species. Brumbies, deer, and rainbow trout are stocked in mountain streams. Things that have made a life somewhere they were never meant to be.
It's a tension that runs quietly through the work. These are paintings, explicitly tied to the purity of practice, that invite you in, that ask you to feel the warmth and the wildness, and to sit with what belonging really means.
