Collection: Ian McGilvray

SOLO EXHIBITION COMING SOON!

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9-26 April 2026 Ian McGilvray Exhibition G1&2

Exhibition opening 11 April 2026, 2-4pm

This Gives Life

“So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee” Sonnet 18, William Shakespeare

This painting series reflects upon how we see and make sense of the world around us. The starting point for the works is the visit of Charles Darwin to Australia in 1836, and his brief encounters with Dharug and Gundungurra country, notably around Wentworth Falls. The storyline then leaps both backward and forward in time to include the pre-eminent love of Darwin’s life, his cousin Emma. Through these musings I explore the vital role of love in giving life and humanity to the enquiring mind.

The works are grouped into two movements.
The first movement focuses on the profound impact on Darwin upon seeing the Jamison Valley in the Blue Mountains, which he termed ‘the great amphitheatre’. Like a promethean actor upon the stage of this ancient landscape, Charles was on a relentless quest to discover the deepest secrets of life and the inner nature of things (Kant’s notion of the thing-in-itself: Ding an sich). As he marvels at the exquisite flora and fauna of the Australian bush, his journals reflect a decisive turning point in his journey toward a bigger picture of nature ’s taxonomy. But is he seeing the picture only with head, not heart?

The second movement explores the life-giving role of Emma Wedgwood in Charles’ life. Devoted to Charles, even throughout his debilitating chronic illness, it was Emma who enabled the great naturalist to pen and to publish his theories at all. This remarkable woman, mother to ten children, was winsome, musical, gracious, long-suffering, highly astute, and politically engaged; her high view of humanity fuelled a lifelong crusade against slavery. Emma’s was a world of people, social concern, the arts, and the working out of faith in times of great flux.
My own personal engagement with Charles and Emma arose initially from living adjacent to the Charles Darwin Walk and the ‘great amphitheatre’ at Wentworth Falls. For me, there is a wider contemporary concern triggered by the story of Charles and Emma. And it is a sort of elephant in the room in our post-truth, post world-order times: What gives life to us? What is at the heart of our being human? Does it lie in that which we know and achieve, or is it in how we give and receive love?
Not wanting to reduce Charles and Emma to stereotypes, my aim is rather to see in their love and lifelong interdependence a leitmotiv for the dance between knowing and being. I am an observer, not an apologist for the Darwins. As it turned out, there were dangerous flaws in Charles’ aristocratic views on what he regarded as racial and cultural dominance (contrasting with the anti-slavery activism of Emma). But that is a story for another day.

The two movements of this series draw in part upon diary records and events. But, for allegorical reasons, the works also wander off the track into imagined worlds and conflated memories.
As in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, there is a subverting twist in these paintings for the viewer who, like me, ponders the question of what (or Who) gives life to us, the stuff of dreams?

Ian McGilvray Summer 2026

ABOUT IAN MCGILVRAY

Before turning to a career in art, Ian was an architect, serving as director at Cox Architecture from 1983 to 2010. During this period he was involved on a wide range of public buildings, educational, research , cultural and sports projects. Ian has been active in promoting the integration of public art into the built environment. In 2013 Ian graduated at COFA in the Master of Art programme, with a painting major. He has travelled widely in Europe, Asia, Canada, and the USA – with particular focus on the Provencale landscape locales of Paul Cezanne.

ARTISTIC PRACTICE

Ian’s artistic practice is centred on the human figure, exploring the intersection of the commonplace with the profound in everyday life. He employs devices of juxtaposition, memory, homage and ambiguity to engage the viewer in a dialogue about dignity within our human condition. Ian seeks to give a contemporary voice in the lyrical figurative tradition to explore longings within us that  point to a higher view of our humanity. He has written and spoken on the role of Christian faith in visual art. Drawing forms the basis of Ian’s artistic practice. In 2012 Ian was awarded the Hornsby Shire Emerging Artist Award. 

EXHIBITIONS

• Feast, Pray, Love: Food and Spirituality exhibition, Collins Street Baptist Church, Melbourne 2013. Finalist.
• 2013 Jenny Birt Award finalist, COFA, Sydney
• Introducing Ian McGilvray exhibition, November 2013 at Wallarobba Art & Cultural Centre, Hornsby NSW.
• Pas de Deux exhibition, April 2016 at Gallery Lane Cove, NSW.
• Kedumba Drawing Prize 2017 entrant.
• Domestic Violence exhibition, Australian National Maritime Museum, 2018.
• Drawn Together exhibition, GalleryOne88, Katoomba, 2021.

PUBLICATIONS AND PAPERS

• ‘Art at the Areopagus’ in Zadok Perspectives No. 118, Autumn 2013
• ‘Domestic Violence against Women: an artist’s response’ in Zadok Perspectives No. 138, Autumn 2018
• ‘Stirred by a Noble Theme: Visual Imagery in the Psalms’, Moore College School of Theology, 2012.
• ‘Outreach and the Artist’ contributing interview.
• Con Campbell, Zondervan, Grand Rapids 2013