130. Jan Fieldsend | The living sparkle

The Living Sparkle (Fieldwork #2 Kamay/Botany Bay)

“Years ago I found a small book in an opportunity shop called Fieldwork in Animal Biology, which as it happens includes guidelines for fieldwork on marine platforms. It predicted a direction in my artwork; amplified and extended in conversations with Marie McMahon and further research on geology, biology and history in the studio.”

“The Living Sparkle is the second work to arise from fortnightly visits to Cape Banks and Cruwee Cove out at Kamay/Botany Bay near the end of Botany Road. A marine platform where underwater gardens are exposed, each rock pool is a unique multicultural assemblage of animals and plants. Delicate anemone pink tendrils, stripy self-housing sea animals, startling pink, apricot and burgundy algae all sway under the glistening brine.”

“To a certain extent I felt as if I was attempting to imitate a bird of paradise, hoping to capture for a moment a passer-by walking…the Botany Bay Rd eco-system”

Jan Fieldsend

Susannah’s drawing is a fastidiously edited composition of litter that has the temporal beauty of a breeze. Something gentle across the skin, it sirs up what ever has been left behind. In a moment it’s perfect and in another, gone.

The obsessive process of this work has Susanna in the window space night after night arranging and rearranging her simple found materials. Through her process she turns the idea of an exhibition on its head by utilising the exhibition time as a period of studio practice. It cumulates in the realisation of a work, fleetingly visible, that can only be known in its passing.

I suppose our lives cannot be known until they are lived, the game of football not known until it is played, and this place can not be fully known until it is gone. It drapes a wistful sorrow across these departure drawings, along with their undeniable beauty and inventiveness. They will be for me at least, a moment to remember.

In this piece, Gail Kenning and Sue Pedley quote the sentiment and words of 5-year-old Xavier Egan at the Light the Dark Vigil in Hyde Park on Monday 7th September. A rally held in solidarity with the waves of fleeing migrants entering Europe during the northern 

summer of 2015.

At SLOT Sue Pedley and Gail Kenning sharpen the focus of sentiment to consider the distinction between a house, a home and a shared refuge in a work that cares little for the question of art when space for existence seems unavailable.

Give me space and don’t tell me what to do. 

Trek Valdizno is a Filipino and he is an abstract artist. Unusual because Filipino art is noted for social realism, the concerns of politics, of corruption, inequality and the psychosexual drama of the Catholicism. Abstraction however has a Filipino history described as Neo-realist Artists so called because they strove to find a separate new reality in their paintings rather than a representation of something already existing. And so it is with Trek. He is striving to achieve to achieve a spontaneous gestural mark not a spontaneous gestural interoperation of reality.

Discussing his work Trek asked the question, does it look Asian, is it oriental? And while a prescriptive definition of Asian Art would be a doomed cliché Trek’s abstract art doesn’t seem dominated by the landscape in the way that Australian abstract at is.

The settler artists of Australia aim to encapsulate the landscape while the potent force of Aboriginal abstract painting expands the connection with land into a cosmology. In comparison Trek offers us marks that sit as objects would with in the space of his paintings.

These paintings look like Abstract Expressionism, an American kind of painting based in part on the appropriated gestural calligraphy of Asia. If Trek re-appropriated his painting we must ask was it miss read through it’s American appropriation - was it modified again to meet Trek’s local requirements, before being repackaged for export where it takes it place on the shelves of a global cultural supermarket?

And in that supermarket Filipino abstract painting has a look about it that is hard to mistake, a look that looks a lot like the paintings of Trek. Raw paintings quickly made of an interior space that is far from 

claustrophobic. 

This exhibition that gracefully fills the window space is in fact 3 works. They are the product of a dialogue between Catriona Stanton and. Anne Ooms, student and teacher. Catriona completed a Masters Degree at Charles Darwin University where Anne was her supervisor. Since then they have maintained their dialogue through collaborative exhibitions Their second, at Wollongong University gave us these works and another that has been short listed for this years Blake Prize. Their academic dialogue has become a professional one.

These pieces began, fossicking along the beach, in things picked up along the road, half forgotten purchases and even presents. “ Anne started the process and sent painted black carved polystyrene forms to me to adorn and embellish however I chose. Sometimes I just worked with found objects that echoed our shared aesthetic. Anne and I have known each other's work for 10 years and Anne also came to the University of Wollongong studio to work with me and responded…to my assemblages.” is how Catriona described their 

working process.

It’s mail-order-creativity, and a dialogue that doesn’t seem to be accompanied by very much conversation. It may not be as simple as that however the conventions of conversation have clearly been replaced by the convention of objects that remain found objects. Found first and found again as they pass from artist to artist.

It is hard not to find sprits lifted looking at these assemblages composed with seemingly effortless understanding. It’s tantalising to imagine unpacking such things and mulling them over with a cup of tea.

Anie Nheu’s art is about space. Most literally the space between 2 pictures. This is the gallery exhibit almost always over looked, it’s the place where something isn’t, as Anie Nheu describes it, the elephant in the room.

In this piece the wall space around the work has been artfully “sculptured” into a form of equal importance to the objects that make up the exhibit. And it is an art of dance. A painted colour unfinished leaves a colour behind that pushes a form back while correspondingly the wall pushes forward. At another moment holes cut in the work offer lagoons of white wall while off shore two islands of colour seem to have been deposited, 

This picture is not presented on a wall, it’s colonising the wall. Gently underlining the fact that it has taken ownership of the space. Gracefully wrapping around a corner in the wall and quietly stepping off the wall on to the floor, this work has arrived in our space, subtly merging with it as we observe its elegant form.

In her notes on the piece Anie Nheu describes her work as “identity formation” a process where the obvious can go unsaid. Here among the morphing relationships of her forms she reads the emotive content of the work. It replicates her life as a migrant. Travelling with her parents from Taiwan through the 3rd world to Australia. Things have never been just one thing for Anie, but if we think for a moment few things ever are just one thing.

This elegantly restrained work approaches the edges of most art and fearlessly steps across them. With out hesitation it side steps the self’ serving clatter or transactional enterprise and in its place offers us poetry, reflection and silences that otherwise would remain unseen, the elephant in the room, indeed.

Kathryn Ortan’s engaging street scene neatly fills the floor space of SLOT. A Street beside a street inviting our gaze down and into the gently rendered spaces of another place. It is part documentation, part memory and part invention. Kathryn explains that she has reconstructed the main street of a small town with buildings remembered from her various visits to Europe and from her travels in Australia. An unlikely combination gently approaching the surrealism of building European styled towns in the Australian bush. It was first exhibited at the Wollongong City Gallery. Here Kathryn’s subject, the spaces we dwell in is expanded through drawings to include the hillside side suburbs of Wollongong. She observes literally as a landscape artist while metaphorically fashioning corners that trap our gaze with seemingly poignant detail. 

Pennie Pomroy is a neighbour. Living a couple of streets away from SLOT where her life is at once an ordinary kind of thing and the charmed existence that many of us can only dream of. The clarity of Pennie’s life is reflected in her art where she aims to capture a sense of whimsy that reflects childhood – “an uninhibited imagination that marries the ordinary and the unexpected” as Pennie describes it and her subject.

Her paintings are about an emotional power that cuts across the deferences of polite suburban etiquette to connect Pennie’s own childhood to her children’s. On the way she touches on the question of our belonging and not belonging in this place – Australia. A place she describes in “images of people, doing unusual things in a usual manner”.

Pennie is comfortable with the surreally absurd even whimsical edge of this life that is thrown up when the experiences and expectations of succeeding generations rub up next to each other. Here, in Pennie’s view political dogma and preconception give way to a child like state where is reason is an imagined construction.

Those things I told you in twilight that amazed us both

Curated by Luisa Tresca

One minute older - By the time I walked by that window, everything changed. 

Walking along Sydney’s Botany Road in Alexandria, a glimpse- locked door, a QR code

male voice - exotic accent, linger.

Those things I told you in twilight that amazed us both is the ongoing project of artist 

Marius Moldaver and curator Luisa Tresca. It started with an exhibition at Gaffa, Sydney, in May 2015.

Within the brief interval of their walking by the window, every passer-by can potentially 

become a co-producer of meaning.

Within this theoretical frame, the interpretation and depiction of a place and a story 

become a collective experience.

Adopting instead a method closer to mythical thinking than science.  Marius’ project, thus installed in a shop window—a commercial space by nature—and facing onto a public street, a situation normally intended to seduce the viewer with a strong and direct message, suggests instead the exact opposite: an intricate tangle of narratives, sewn on felt and orally narrated, which intertwine unexpectedly and which the random consumer is challenged to make their own.

Luisa Tresca