Coming Soon - Project Contemporary Artspace

In Greek and Hellenistic art, the idea of pothos or longing formed an undercurrent in all representation. This was a longing for travelling further, going deeper, loving more fervently and with wider friendships, into great continents and across oceans. The title of this show underlines the constant quest, the yearning to clarify an individual vision.

Diana Wood Conroy’s daily watercolour painting maps a fragment of the teeming mind to grasp a moment and observe what is around, inside and outside. A self-portrait often appears as an empty cup, a ruined temple or a headless goddess. The Dharawal Country that surrounds the artist’s home in Woonona watches her. The birds still speak those ancient languages. Diana is reminded of an ancient tomb inscription: ‘with wings the soul flies’.

Working primarily in the woven artform of tapestries, drawing and watercolour for Diana has always been a necessary corollary to weaving, a parallel way of thinking. The scintillating hues evoke the luminosity of dye, and their repetition in lines and blocks makes a mesh like the vertical warp and horizontal weft of weaving. A woven calendar with each of the 365 stripes representing one painting, makes the idea of time materially evident.

The paintings make a pattern to each day, forming lines and grids. The 2025 year observed in Searching for the beloved: a year in watercolour becomes a continuous scroll or panels like book pages. Full of unforeseen events, as every year is, each work in 2025 takes a title from the artist’s journals and reading.

All art is a search for the beloved - John Tavener (British composer 1944 -2013).

Brief biography: Diana Wood Conroy 2026

Diana Wood Conroy is an Australian artist and scholar with degrees in Archaeology, Visual Arts and Theology. As artist-in-residence, and archaeologist at the Paphos Theatre Excavation in Cyprus since 1996, her artwork explores classical and personal worlds and is held in national and international collections. Her warmly received retrospective exhibition, An Archaeology of Woven Tapestry was held at the Wollongong Art Gallery in 2024.

Her research interests combine archaeology and contemporary visual cultures in many publications, most recently Tiwi textiles: design, making and process, with Bede Tungutalum (2022). Her longstanding involvement with Aboriginal communities began in 1974 when she was co-ordinator of Tiwi Designs, Bathurst Island, Northern Territory.

In 2025 she curated an exhibition of art and archaeology Journeys to Cyprus, for the Australian High Commission of Cyprus in Nicosia and Paphos. She is Emeritus Professor, Visual Arts at the University of Wollongong, NSW, Australia.