22 Jul Critique 23rd July 2020

The return to the studio has been both wonderful and depressing. It has been amazing to have space, to be able to paint and be temporarily removed from the apartment and the sometimes total hijacking of all my energy and thought, It has, however, been bitterly cold on occasion, eerie and echoey, and has felt – often – like we are unwanted guests, difficult and demanding. It’s also highlighted the oddness and randomness of the rules of our new world, a balance between safety and economics, of arbitrary and contradictory sets of hurdles and barriers to the life we had before. There is no way that work created in this place and with these thoughts can stand unmoved. Within this new terroir, my existence in landscape (and my project) shifts and slithers around these new circumstances.

The first week back in the studio felt like stretching after a heavy sleep. Awakening on return from a holiday with bags to unpack, and attempting to pick up the dropped thread of a life interrupted, to sink back into a rhythm that feels productive and happy. The first works are big, messy and a bit frantic. Arms outstretched and dirty with charcoal, ink and anything that came to hand. I took old works and repinned them to the wall, working over them with arm wide washes and into them with tiny marks, my nose right up against the window of the paper, The term found at the end of last session point de capiton plays over in my head as these tiny stitches cover swathes of paper, tiny marks of days counted down, little sutures joining tears in memories, repeated and insistent negations.

In a bookstore in New Norfolk I found a beautiful book of works by Yun Hyong-Keun. It speaks of the power of materiality, and of a work being its own process – a returning to and even ritual. My own process though is not so ritualistic, it jumps and stutters. Some days messy and exuberant, some days wrung in mean drips from what was leftover yesterday. I was reminded of some little works I began – dipping paper in the resinous, headachy sap of the cypress.

As I took apart and reassembled work I found that the details were accumulating, pooling around eye-level. Glowing shadows and compulsive details all at eye level, drawn only where my breath would fog up the glass of a window. I feel like I’m struggling against the cartridge paper and its limitations. I substituted the sharp flatness and whiteness for a sheet of Kozo paper, scrunched and folded until it feels like fabric, and again the tiny sutures congregated at eye level, drifting across the page like views from a restless eye or the window of a car.

As the work grew, it oscillated from recording my own arms outstretched to tiny obsessive mark-making. Back and forth and in and out. Maybe it became unmanageable, and taking it apart I folded it all back up into a more manageable size. All the imagery on the inside, packed up like a briefcase. Pinned to the wall it unfolds itself, spewing out the dark messiness, faceted views revealing themselves again. Shapes and imagery repeated and imprinted back onto themselves. Multiple Rorschach tests covered in fingerprints. From these larger works I took tiny strips and made small, pocket-sized versions, little impressions of a landscape to slip into my pocket or between the pages of a new book.

A short, painting filled weekend, wasn’t specifically project related but was a welcome foray into the wider landscape and I found the way I looked at the landscape had changed, I brought back an armful of collected thoughts to my project. The structures of the naked tree, the way the blue sky caught in the gnarled branches, the way the landscapes flickers and shifts as I tried to capture it before the sun moved too far, before the clouds drifted, before it was time for lunch.

Back in the studio and another large pinup of pre-used cartridge paper to layer over, to pick out memories and details. The work finished, I picked it apart again, arranging all the pages until points touch and make new connections. Briefly a window, briefly a cross and then all back in a pile. Maybe as someone suggested, the work is measured by weight. A stack of scratchings, a ream of musings, useless and heavy.

As I move around more outside, further away from the apartment, untethered from the cypress tree that was my single view, I’m forgetting, losing details of memories and experiences of that landscape. The clearest points of reference are those I detailed. A vial of sticky ink and a scrunched up sketch in the depths of my bag may be all that existed and might be all that remains.

I have also been considering the end of year exhibition, a resolution in kind for the project. A new novel I’m reading rattles around in my head, touching on my own project and how it may look for the exhibition. The characters in Modiano’s MIssing person are shadowed, silhouetted, studied in the light and wondered about in the semi-darkness. They stoop in uncomfortable places, appear and disappear in photographs, and the sands keep their footsteps for “only a few moments”. I intend to construct an immersive video installation space, perhaps in the multimedia room on the ground floor. The installation will consist of a screen dividing the room in half, and keeping the viewer in one half of the room. On this screen the film I make will be projected from the rear and from the front, behind the viewer a spotlight will silhouette the viewer onto the screen. The assumption I made initially was that the white light from the spotlight will render the film invisible, leaving a person-shaped space for the film to play out. The viewer will be able to move around, and although the film will play irrespective of where they stand or what they do, they are taking on a degree of choice as to where they stand and how they move. I have made a little mockup of the space and tried various materials to get this effect and am hopeful that it will work as I thought (with adjustments to the brightness of both the spotlight and the projector globe).

I’ve looked at the work by Martin Walch and David Stephenson in terms of this kind of immersive experience. The work of Douglas Gordon and in particular 24 Hour Psycho Back and Forth and To and Fro (2008) is of particular interest. The idea of playing the film both forward on one half of the screen and backwards on the other half is appealing. The viewer may feel a degree of half-remembered memory, of déjà vu, If the films shift and change slightly in each iteration, potentially there is a sense of disquiet, a questioning as to whether something is familiar, is a memory, is a recognition. I love too the reference to a Rorschach test. as the films meet in the centre and race away from each other in a glitching mirror image. Another migraine brought this feeling out further, this sense of doubling and repetition, a questioning as to whether links are made subconsciously, by association, or by proximity, or even in retrospect. I would love the film to engender these sparks of connections between the viewer and their own experience of landscape.

The last piece I have worked on is a landscape from a window on the Gordon River. In a way, I feel like these works are a storyboard of kind; a processing of ideas and feelings through almost an object-orientated type process. They work like small modules of code, each running through its own loops and processes, self-sufficient and propelled. As they are shifted and arranged they work together in larger programs with different meanings and interpretations. Maybe the memory of the landscape works like that – little sections of code, written in a certain way, some redundant, some based on bodily experience, on a photo, am unrelated comment from someone. Immutable into the future, invisible in the large program, some working inexplicably, some full of bugs and glitches.