"Churchill has his black dogs and Kafka his white mice - enemies of creation taking animal form.  But the one you don't want to mess with is The Moose.  The Moose doesn't come often [he is trapped in a stairwell with his ridiculous antlers,] but when he does you can hear his low, bellowing reverberating around the house." - Nick Cave, Art and Australia, Vol. 46 Spring 2008 p134.

TANYA CHAITOW's acrylic on board paintings explore the relationship between emotion and imagination. CHAITOW simultaneously invites the viewer into her intensely personal exploration of human emotions and relationships, at the same time that she encourages the viewer to look outside her work and into their own world.  

CHAITOW says "in the quest for the poetic and inventive I battle with The Moose to escape the physical constraints of my studio and explore the realms of the unconscious. My created narrative allows the viewer to to be the hero of their own life, offering complete freedom to enter as themselves, identify with the characters and leave as one of them.These adult fairy stories emerge from the constructed universe of the imagination where the characters are half fantasy and half reality. The emotional life of the self is projected into the mythical part animal, part human characters at the bottom of the garden."

Born in Johannesburg, South Africa CHAITOW immigrated to Australia in 1978. CHAITOW completed her Masters of Fine Art at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales at the end of 2007 and in the same year spent three months completing a residency at the Cite of Paris. She has exhibited in many solo and group shows, including Art on the Rocks, and is represented in both public and private collections in Australia, South Africa and the USA.

DENESE OATES creates striking, asymmetrical sculptures and wall works using aged metal and iconic imagery from the natural environment.

OATES says she is "interested in the vulnerability of nature" and "man's relationship with the environment". In this exhibition she has morphed from the biological into the botanical, into a concern for plant structures. OATES uses scale to transform the perception of her partial figurative and often abstracted imagery.

Director of the Maitland Regional Art Gallery, Joe Eisenberg, says "like all artists of distinction Oates is not afraid to travel roads which at times lead to nowhere. This is because at other times whole new worlds are opened, ready to be discovered and translated into masterful sculptures waiting to be viewed and viewed again. There is much to see and even more to experience in copper, steel, lead and other times found or cast metals which can be mistaken for living organisms where some of them began their journey- somewhere in the distant past."

Born in Orange, NSW, OATES studied at the Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education in Sydney (now College of Fine Arts, UNSW). Since 1976 OATES has exhibited in over fifty group exhibitions and twenty solo exhibitions. Her work is extensively represented in both public and private collections, including Parliament House, Canberra, University of Sydney Union, Wollongong City Art Gallery and Christchurch City Collection, New Zealand.

Sculpture 2009 will be the eighth year that the galleries at Danks Street have begun with exhibitions highlighting sculpture. The combined opening of the Danks Street galleries (January 21) is always a high point on the party calendar!