Having established a solid career in his home-town of Perth, Garry Pumfrey has recently relocated his practice to Melbourne’s beachside suburb of St Kilda. The result of this continental crossing has been a wealth of new inspiration drawn from the vestiges of Melbourne’s industrial past.

As a landscape painter Pumfrey’s style exploits a deft use of high realism to capture the underlying drama of a scene, the general banality of the built environment serving to reveal underlying cultural dilemmas or desires. Best known for his portrayal of the industrial boom besieging Perth’s outer regions, this new Melbourne sojourn has led Pumfrey to explore the forgotten or dwindling industrial blocks behind Port Melbourne.

While the rest of Melbourne is being transformed by a surge of medium density apartment dwellings, Pumfrey has headed instead for the shadowy spaces under and around the Westgate Bridge, to the often overlooked remnants of a working class portside culture of industry and manufacturing. With its giant silos and plumes of grey smoke, areas such as Fisherman’s Bend offer a radically different view of Melbourne.

“I love the drama of the port area - the looming structure of the Westgate Bridge and the monolithic quality of the areas factories. In contrast to the relatively new rise of industrial activity in Perth, Melbourne’s factories have an aged, heavy quality.”

The works for this, his second solo exhibition in Melbourne, have evolved through a series of exploratory journeys through backstreets and along train tracks in search of that right composition and to observe the changing effects of light on a subject. “Perth’s light has a really bleaching effect that has featured significantly in my previous works. Here I wanted to capture something of the cooler climate, to see how well I could represent wintery cloud or midnight fog.”

As vignettes of an overlooked landscape Pumfrey’s paintings offer both an opportunity to observe Melbourne with fresh eyes and to acknowledge a scene that may soon succumb to the expanding boundaries of inner city development.

Garry Pumfrey studied art and design at the Claremont School of Art, before studying for a further twelve months at Edith Cowan University in 1999. He has participated in several group shows and art awards. He won an award in the 2004 Town of Vincent Art Award, won the Peoples Choice Award at the City of Joondalup Invitational Art Award in 2004 and has taken out first prize twice at the Gascoyne Biennale and once at the Kalgoorlie Boulder Art Exhibition. He was awarded ArtsWA funding for his Melbourne and Sydney exhibitions, and has work in several public collections, including Parliament House Collection, Murdoch University and Edith Cowan University.

Click here to view Pumfrey's recent exhibition