Lucie Thorne: LAND AND LANGUAGE

4.4.25 – 20.4.25

Exhibition opens 6pm Friday 4 April 2025

Lucie Thorne & Hamish Stuart – Live in Concert
Sat 5 April 2025, MacGregor Hall (upstairs from Smiths)
Tickets at Smiths Alternative

Over the past 25 years, Tasmanian born, Melbourne-based artist and producer Lucie Thorne has made a lot of music; writing and releasing over a dozen albums and touring prodigiously across Australia, Europe and North America. She’s been lauded for writing “some of the most beautiful songs you will hear” (The Age) creating “exquisitely impressionistic… poetry in motion” (Rolling Stone Magazine).

Over the past two and a half years, Lucie Thorne has made a lot of paintings.

After some initial forays into working with colour, starting with a set of oil pastels gifted during the covid pandemic in 2020, Lucie found acrylic paint in 2022. In March 2024 Lucie held her first-ever exhibition in Melbourne, an overwhelming success, and now we’re thrilled to host her second presentation, Land and Language.

Transcendent excursions in colour and form, Land and Language is a body of work which has emerged from a time of profound grief. In the Spring of 2021 both Lucie’s parents, Tim and Stephanie Thorne died within weeks of each other. Several other close friends died in close succession soon thereafter. From the wordless depths of loss came an outlet of expression where no words were needed. What started as a salve has become an encompassing passion.

Lucie’s practice is substantial and original. She is demonstrating an astonishing commitment to painting, drawing from a deep well of emotion with abundant energy and expression of life.Concurrent to Lucie Thorne’s new-found painting practice, she edited Tim Thorne – Greatest Hits – Poems 1968-2021, a collection of her favourite TT poems, which was published by Puncher & Wattmann in October 2024. Lucie also recently produced a posthumous Sara Tindley album project, Golden Girl, which was released on Thorne’s imprint Little Secret Records in November 2024.

The title of the show and of many of the works are drawn from Tim’s poems. Many other works including the Singing Farmer series are a homage to the late Sara Tindley.

Language travels on a wet road,
can spin without warning…
Land is clever
but not magical. Language
does not exist until it’s made.