OLD LAND, NEW VISION

Julie Harris, Rowen Matthews, Simon Leigh Munro, Angus Nivison, James Rogers

The work in Old Land, New Visions is expressive and immersive. The exhibition is dominated by strong shapes, sometimes weighty masses in Angus’s work, sometimes lighter airy marks in Julie’s work. The shapes in these paintings and sculptures are large and elegantly declared. Gesture dominates and it is so intimately connected with the body that when we look into the works in this exhibition we cannot see the shapes without imagining the motion made by the artist during the production of the work. Traditionally the human body is particularly evident in the three-dimensional production of sculpture, and the tracery of human engagement is clearly present in James’ arabesques. In art, human movement is translated into “living marks” and in this exhibition, energetic living marks are dominant in paintings as well as sculptures.

The land I painted for this exhibition includes the Muluerindie River. The visual narrative is the emotional dialogue that occurs between the land and myself within the painting process, remaining as evidence in the gestural paint marks on the surface. The paintings express longitudinal incursions into land. I recognise similar process in many works in this exhibition. Simon seeks deeper understanding of Country in his paintings and consequently his work stands as an emotive report of that experience. Many of Julie’s paintings express a strong engagement with water over a passage of time rather than a moment of time. Her gestures are looping, rhythmic, and continuous. Angus paints a lifelong familiarity with the effects of weather, particularly rain, and arabesque fluidity remains a constant motif for James. 

There is a willingness throughout this exhibition to foreground the qualities of the materials used. Materials are engaged as gestural vehicles as each artist marks 

their response to the surrounding world. The materials speak about themselves as they form artworks. Metal, clay, ochre, grass tree resin, and paint reflect a sensory-emotive response to experience, providing a rhythm of place and time in preference to depicting more literal observations of land.  In this manner, the primacy of experience is enabled and in turn able to be transferred to an audience. The materials displayed in Old Land, New Visions hold emotive content and transfer an emotional response to the audience. This process is powerfully evident in the energetic textures and inventive materiality of Simon’s After the Fire as he employs grass tree resin and ochre. The processing of materials can be felt. In James’ sculpture the processing of metal is transferred as a tactile experience: the twists, the smooth metal surfaces and the energetic cut-marks are felt by the audience as intended. In Julie’s Black Mountains, the parabolic mounds of clay and glaze speak so clearly of a weathered yet strong earth. In the paintings, the duration and movement of paint across the surface is celebrated, exaggerated, pushed to new limits. The paint at times seems to be enriching itself and at other times exhausting itself. The variety of tools pushing paint around creates a sense of effort and pace as gesture becomes line. Qualities of paint are manipulated to express individual response, from Julie’s judiciously stained raw canvas to Angus’s flat matte even surfaces to my thin/thick dry/rich oily surfaces. These material variances reflect the variance of land on which the works were made as much as they reflect the artists’ embodied engagement with the surface.