211. Kathryn Cowen · Gareth Jenkins | Future nature

In 2017 Kathryn Cowen put up a show in SLOT titled #Other Worlds. In her eerie Si-Fi landscape, bathed in UV light a gentleman calls on a young woman - a fairy tale - where they both are wearing the fish bowl style space helmets of comic-book astronauts. It’s a tale, like all good Si-Fi tales that begins in whimsy and ends with the bight of reality – a fair tale no more.

For Kathryn that painting was a door. It opened to possibilities leading, as she put it “away from the element of taste”. She began making assemblage works in styrofoam, bent wire, plastic tubing - the simple materials that become the stuff of a wonder in the hands of a prop maker working on a B grade Si-Fi movie. On that score Kathryn’s inventiveness doesn’t disappoint. Her inventions appear organic, possibly from the oceans depths? No, they are “Biomorphs, hybrid organisms made with a combination of organic and synthetic materials” she insists.

These assemblages are a Si-Fi speculation on Future Naturewhere an artificial intelligence has reconfigured the idea of a plant to more precisely cater to the needs of a post human world. Some #Other World - where gentle-he-bots call on young-she-bots in a never ending cycle kicked off by Elon Musk when he launched his first colonisation of Mars - perhaps.

Gareth and Kathryn began working together when she asked him to provide a sound work in response to her piece, #Other World 2. Now Gareth has provided a sound track that can be accessed by scanning the QR code with a mobile phone. Seemingly, already science fiction, Gareth’s poetry has evolved into sound at his site, Apothecary Archive where he describes the watery landscape of Future Nature.

Of course it’s a fantasy - but it stands uncomfortably on a few toes as we watch yet another flood wash through, this time down the Namoi to Gunnedah and wonder at Pakistani where “floods were caused by heavier than usual monsoon rains and melting glaciers that followed a severe heat wave, all of which are linked to climate change. It is the world's deadliest flood since the 2017 South Asian flood described as the worst in the country's history. On 25 August, Pakistan declared a state of emergency because of the flooding. By 29 August, Pakistan's minister of climate change said around "one-third" of the country was under water, affecting 33 million people” Wikipedia.

Jan hesitated to give Flower Painting as the title of her show. But she was quick to declare – “Imagine a world without flowers”. Her joyous description of flowers took her back to a childhood in rural New Zealand to memories of cut lawns, buttercups and harvest festival floral arrangements set up in her father’s church. Then she confided, precisely these flowers are weeds, collected – set up in a vase – as the starting point for paintings that celebrate the lightness of marks offered spontaneously in praise of accidents. She feels that her paintings reveal themselves slowly as they progress to a certain “rightness” that would be the perfect accident.

These “accidents” are only the beginning of Jan’s work. Her paintings are set within an architecture of paper that billows to the floor in a seeming reference to Chinese scroll painting. This complex tradition enshrines a spontaneous mark at one with the natural world in a structure that is more book than picture frame. Such pictures are temporal; they are to be appreciated from time to time, like a movie as opposed to being a permanent decoration on a wall as a painting might be.

Half-jokingly I asked if Jan had given us The Holy Trinity, the father the son and the holy ghost - but yes, this is the Church of the Holy Trinity and an observation of the Ellerslie Presbyterian Church of Jan’s childhood in New Zealand. An austere church where elaborate decoration is rejected in favour of a spiritual insight held in the mind, by nothing more than the plainness of a vase of flowers? Jan went on to describe our aesthetic as a kind of religion and wondered if religion might be a copy of that aesthetic.

For Jan there is a truth in the materials of her painting and the accidents of their creation. It touches the imagined architecture of faith with nothing more than a vase of weeds. An offering that passes - that, delightfully can be thrown out when it has died while her works linger with a spirituality that is as light as it is profound.

Anie Nheu’s piece Passing Through is both an appreciation of nature and a consideration of the appreciation of nature in art.

It began during a holiday on a farm at East Gresford beside Allyn River in the upper Hunter. Anie was struck by the beauty of the landscape and the trees she saw. So much so that she began drawing them, on this occasion a casuarina on the left and a eucalypt on the right. Back in her Sydney studio and faced with the proposition of making something out of her time away for SLOT, Anie focused on her drawing.

In a pile of some-one-else’s thrown-out junk she noticed an exquisite Art Nouveau frame, a style that celebrated organic form, in particular trees. It seems to have set the tone of Anie’s piece. Lovingly restored it embellishes the rawness of the Australian bush with an orientalist elegance. 

Like a giant piece of ikebana, a tree branch cut and re-assembled for the window space offers a counterpoint to the stylised representation of bamboo that frames Anie’s drawing of native trees - incidentally it is drawn in charcoal, the burnt fragments of trees, and is pointing out that the paper is pulped and processed timber taking the metaphor too far? Standing looking at the finished work I found myself thinking how many ways can you say tree in art? Anie commented that she saw it as commodification. She felt that the process of art is to make a commodity out of an experience. In this case the revelry found in nature. Sure, it’s not such a big thing, but in the hands of an artist it becomes that.

This then is a meditation on our function in nature as much as it is a meditation on a couple of trees in nature. We commodify as Anie points out, we transform, process, consume and combust. It is our art. Our agency is vast and sweeping. We approach it with such urgency that few have a moment for pause as Anie does, to think widely while gazing at a couple of trees in a paddock on a farm up the Hunter.

This isn’t what Chris Casali intended to show in SLOT.

She broke the news gently in an email – “I was in two minds…what to show …. I have been developing new work alongside my watercolours and thought to show a painting …Like most of my work it's abstract with hints to the land…Is it a problem…I've never shown work like this before…Hmmmm just not sure that's all and thought to write.”

Not being sure might be the prevailing state of mind for an artist. If so, becoming sure would be their aim and working out what they can be sure of would be what they do. In conversation Chris described it as her process, that is how she goes about making a painting. “It’s a slow revelation of detail that causes the work to be always giving and not predictable” is how she put it.

There are romantic edges to Chris’s process. She described travelling with friends through the Australian desert, of making paintings on the ground and drying them in the branches of trees. But mainly it happens for Chris in her studio. A room, like most other studios, more or less empty and away from most other things where a kind of meditation begins. One thing leads to another, which often enough seems to be an act of desperation. Because like a caged animal, artists will try anything, take any risk to realise their work, in a bid for freedom that remains nothing more than a half-glimpsed possibility.

And so it might be with Chris’s painting. A single sweeping gesture poured over a deftly crafted canvas that hints at details drawn in the landscape. Is this a rock pool with a crest of foam left as the tide recedes? Or a kind of Xray of the desert she recently visited? A landscape perversely sculpted by water – driven by the same gravity that dictates the flows and splashes of Chris’s paint, applied in hope of realising sureness. It is however, whatever you see it as.

But how does Chris see it? – exactly as you see it here. Not the step before, or the step after that she might have taken next – it is this step that she is sure of. The watercolour on paper that became an acrylic painting on canvas that replaced her planed exhibit in a process, where possibilities are examined without predigest, is of course exactly what Chris Casali intended to show in SLOT. This is the summation of her process.

Emidio Puglielli’s work Halves is an examination of forgetting. It is an answer he says to the question, “what does forgetting look like”. And it’s a quest that began in his adult years with the discovery that he had forgotten the people and events of his childhood as recorded in a box of family photos. As much as prompting artmaking, that moment of pause proposed an academic inquiry. Begun at RMIT in Melbourne, because he needed to understand his making process, it has since become a PhD.

This quietly poetic work, Halves, speaks, without mediation, of a mood that defies articulation. It is simultaneously known and unknown, as Emidio says “the physical presence of an absence.” His art begins in anonymous photographs found in junk shops that have a single common quality they were made in the late 1960’s and early 70’s, the years of Emidio’s childhood. They are scanned and reprinted before what we would immediately think of as the subject is surgically removed. Remarkably, rather than cancelling the mood of the photograph it seems to be amplified.  Assembled as a narrative that mood is maintained in a kind of cinematic panorama. In this language of images, mood is triggered by a multitude of known and lived experiences dominated by a nameless presence.

For Emidio this adult dance of half memory is a counterpoint to his adolescent years when as the child of Italian immigrants to Melbourne he yearned of forgetting. It would be an unburdening that would permit Emidio the outsider to take on the mantle of an Australian everyman. Returning to Italy as an adult he described the experience of many migrants who in returning “home” discover they are again the outsider because “home” like everywhere else has moved on. They are the prisoner of a memory that like the wisps of familiarity clustered at the edges of Emidio’s work Halves is all that remains of the past. 

Standing alone looking at Emidio’s seemingly familiar work I wonder, is this; a lament for memories lost, reconciliation with what remains of the past or a celebration of language and mood encapsulated in a narrative of our time?

Later this year SLOT will have been exhibiting continuously for 20 years. A monumental achievement that is being celebrated by the Delmar Gallery, 144 Victoria Street, Ashfield with an exhibition SLOT20, 25 March – 30 April. A collection of 20 windows previously exhibited in SLOT that opens on Sunday 26 March 2.00 – 4.00pm. You, our public are warmly invited.

This work, Separate reality by Junyee, is one of SLOT’s earliest shows. First exhibited in 2004 it is SLOT’s contribution to our anniversary exhibition and features on the cover of the Delmar Gallery catalogue to the exhibition.

16 April – 20 May 2023 

It’s too cute to say that Rox‘s life is threaded on to this looping work of art but it’s true.

She began telling her story with studies at the Canberra School of Art and a move to Sydney that landed her in the Thomas Lane Studios, a collection of old commercial buildings in the Haymarket that had become home to a celebrated collection of artists in the 1980’s. Among them, Gary Shead, who became a mentor- Rox says provided her an art education. In the 1990’s she was showing paintings made on discarded metal lithographic plates at Legge Gallery, one of Sydney’s legendary galleries located a little further along Regent Street from SLOT. Then, in 1998 she met Pablo and love. He worked for Qantas, and they travelled the world - museum by museum, living in Madrid and her painting on discarded book covers, an inclination that Rox puts down to her Italian migrant parents and their rule, waste not want not.

Back in Sydney, living at Bondi Rox took to walking the beach with her son. Slowly and attentively, she began picking up pieces of plastic – gleaning for plastic is how she described her collecting of what has become the material of her art and its subject. While technically found objects, these shards of plastic are very much sought after. Now they are almost mined from the beaches of the Eastern Suburbs by Rox as a cleansing that the planet demands in exchange for our survival. Undeniably beautiful these jittering garlands are a glorious affirmation of life, simultaneously a warning that life is threatened and a demonstration of humanities capacity to survive.

This and Rox’s work more generally speaks of the multi layered content that we look for in contemporary art. We want to party in the name of a good cause, is another way of saying that despite dire warnings of a looming catastrophe, art persists.  Art making, unquestionably, one of the first markers of humanity will equally be one of the last we surrender as a civilisation. A few nights ago, I watched, over a round or 3 of drinks as a friend fashioned a bird’s head from the wax container of goat’s cheese. An incidental expression of tenderness formed from what every came to hand. Rox’s art has a cousin there and another in the Indian flower market where flowers, fresh and dried are threaded day after day into garlands to be draped across the deities and the rest of life, rendering it sacred. Here the elation we find in Rox’s work has it’s equal and in SLOT it asks, is our capacity to read beauty in such savage detritus a measure of humanity’s hope or a measure of its peril?