Roger Stuart’s photographs, together with paintings by Alison Thomas, are showing now in the exhibition Place and Identity – Paris and Bega at Ivy Hill Gallery, Wapengo. The exhibition runs to Sunday, 1st December.
“Roger says that many places have shaped his identity, from the small country towns of his childhood to the Australian and overseas cities of his adult life. Two of these have particularly influenced him and, therefore, his photography. The first is his now home country, the Cuttagee area near Bermagui, together with its contiguous sparsely populated coastline. The second is the great urban metropolis of Paris, which first amazed him in 1968, where he was later able to work and live for several years and where he now has family.
“This is an unlikely pairing, juxtaposing a place of near wilderness and an intensively peopled, globally significant city. But he says that for him those starkly contrasting qualities are also highly complementary, each providing something important that is absent in the other: the wild beauty, wildlife and ancient habitation and culture of the Cuttagee/Bermagui area; and the elegance and integration of Paris’s streetscapes, its ancient traces, its cultural richness and density and the liveliness and huge variety of the people that fill its public spaces.”