May Barrie + Tori de Mestre

Overview

May Barrie is 93 and takes delight in bare existence — the boulders that surround her Calderwood property, Callemondah, represent the way her internal and external worlds interconnect. She has passed her passion for shape and form onto her daughter, Tori de Mestre, who lives with her in simplicity and seclusion.

May studied sculpture during the Australian Modernist period of the 1950s and has been shaping hulky rocks into abstract, sensual forms for more than fifty years now. Her hefty, three-metre-tall Moruya granite carving was awarded the Balnaves Foundation Sculpture prize at the Sculpture by the Sea judging at Bondi in 2009. It received widespread praise and David Handley, the founder of the annual exhibition, bemoaned the fact that May has been hidden literally under a rock.

This grandmother of stone sculpture is what you might call a compulsive artist; she believes her art practice informs her self-actualising process. Tori, who has recently made her foray into the medium of sculpture with the Farmgate series, shares her mother talent for allegory and metaphor; land and mythology.

Image: Tori de Mestre, Farmgate 7