There isn't anyone who hasn't, at least once in their life, spent an hour lying on their back on a beach or a grassy slope in the park, watching clouds transform from fluffy bunny to turtle to a profile of Alfred Hitchcock. It's the universal Rorschach Test that can produce some surprises, especially for the imaginatively challenged.
If you've grown to sophisticated to continue the practice or just plain forgotten how to do it, check out this exhibition. Biggs brings a gaggle of clouds into the gallery and serves up a collection of suggested shapes and imagined ideas, in cotton candy colours and intriguing black and white.
The series Scud involves six small works rich in surface texture and gentle in hue. There is no definition of specifics here rather a cluster of soft blue-greens, pinks and mauves to indicate these are dawn skies. In the slightly larger works, Glow, Afternoon, Zephyr and others, the surface is worked smoothly to form ribbons of sunset hues. These are decorative abstract compositions in harmonious colours.
Other, larger works in the series Sky are stronger in colour and the suggestion of cloud formations. In Sky #6 rich warm copper and dusty rose hues are brushed across the canvas in a manner that alludes to voluminous clouds running before the wind. Other images see colour collecting into almost identifiable shapes that can be interpreted at will by the viewer.
But it is the charcoal and pastel chalk images in blue, black and grey, with an occasional hint of a rainbow hue that take us beyond atmospheric conditions to where the imagination runs free. These images remind us of the vapour's continuous movement, its collecting into volumes or stretching thin, then they are frozen in that split second when we think we can see 'something'. But there are no kindly creatures here, instead Biggs discovers in eastern Tasmanian skies the spooky Shape Shifters that once occupied the mists of Celtic forests. In these drawings the medium is worked heavily in some areas and merely brushed over the rag paper in others to imply organic shapes that engage the mind in all sorts ideas of space ships and ogres and things that go bump in the night.
The exhibition is an example of the artist's ability with her medium and the subject selected gives her room to play with colour. Not a bad effort.