Turbulent Terrain: Manifestations of the Sublime in Contemporary Art
Peter Daverington

Peter Daverington completed a Graduate Diploma in Visual Art in 2004 and a Masters of Fine art at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2006. He has travelled extensively, spending long periods in Egypt, Turkey, Germany, USA and Guatemala and has studied Turkish Ney flute with several masters.

Spanning both Romantic and postmodern notions of the sublime, Peter Daverington’s paintings represent systems of knowledge that underpin both scientific and spiritual enquiries. Taking Euclidian geometry as his starting point, Daverington creates grids that appear to continue into infinity, generating depths within his paintings that suggest the continual unfolding of space, of a system with no beginning and no end. The spectacular landscapes which are enmeshed within these endless frameworks directly reference the nineteenth century Romantic landscape tradition, but more significantly suggest that these, and hence all visible matter, form part of a larger, and unseen, reality. Daverington’s interest in the purity of geometry is linked to his extensive study of Islamic culture and history, in particular Sufism, and his personal experience of studying with the mystical Islamic sect, the Whirling Dervishes.

Early Islamic astronomers used geometry in their study of the stars and considered the circle (with its related forms of the triangle, square and polygon) to be the perfect form to represent infinite space and the only symbol that could be used to represent God or Allah. From this grew the Islamic tradition of geometric abstraction, applied extensively to the tiled decoration of mosques to suggest the connectedness of divine architectural space to the infinite space of the cosmos. In place of the mosque, Daverington substitutes the landscape, suggesting the complexity of the natural environment and its systems, and the interconnectedness of all matter. Peter Daverington is represented by Arc One Gallery, Melbourne

Image: Peter Daverington, Imprisoned Landscape, 2008, oil, acrylic and enamel on canvas