O HORIZON, catalogue essay
Matt Arbuckle / Wona Bae and Charlie Lawler /
Sean Bailey / BronWyn Dillon / Eloise Kirk /
Grant Nimmo / Kate Tucker / Alice Wormald
SALAMANCA ARTS CENTRE
In early 2020, I, like many, felt my relationship to the natural world start to shift. As the world went mad and the supermarket shelves emptied, I earnestly planted vegetables in my backyard for the looming apocalypse. As any gardener will tell you, it is an enormously therapeutic and calming activity to spend time with your hands in the earth, planting and planning for future growth. Cultural theorist Rebecca Solnit writes, “In an age of lies and illusions, the garden is one way to ground yourself in the realm of the processes of growth and the passage of time, the rules of physics, meteorology, hydrology and biology, and the realms of the senses” (Solnit 44). I was a gardening convert, finding respite from the haze of lockdowns in the simple joys and confines of my small plot.
But then, in passing, I heard that my inner-city council has approximately a third of properties with contaminated soils unfit to grow food in — this is hardly unique, it’s a common story across the world. A soil sample scraped from my garden’s surface came back with the heartbreaking news of my own toxic horizon. The lush, leafy greens that I'd lovingly grown to feed the family were now poisonous triffids in disguise. I ripped out my veggies, instead panic-buying raised beds to fill with plastic bags of store-bought soil. They were delivered by men in gas masks, an apocalyptic pandemic vision – the embodiment of our desperate clash with nature, played out at a micro level on the soil of a city backyard.
My focus drew closer, to the horizon beneath me, a myopic vision that also demanded an understanding of the environmental processes affecting the broader world. This dual focus can be seen through the artists' work in O Horizon, of the ground beneath one’s feet as a microcosm of the issues of the world.
The exhibition draws inspiration from the O horizon, the top layer in a vertical profile of soil. This is the top strata of earth, the biodiverse site of microorganisms and fungi, decomposing organic matter from plants and animals, leaf litter, mosses and lichens. The artists brought together for this exhibition are diverse in their approaches, but share an interest in the earth and concern for its care.
The O horizon has metaphoric connotations of regeneration, and the naming of this underfoot layer as a 'horizon' is richly evocative. Rather than being in the distance, a horizon can be immediately beneath your feet, a shift in perspective that has associations with the mindfulness technique of ‘grounding'. The title ‘O horizon’ is lifted from soil science, but used loosely as artistic inspiration rather than as illustration of a geological term.
O Horizon explores the beauty that can be found in the overlooked elements of landscape, the leaf litter, mosses, and soil, and our connection to the environment as we experience it through the earth underfoot. Through a closer contemplation of the microcosm we can also examine broader issues about our environment. The exhibition refocuses our attention to the earth and nutrient-rich topsoils that are vital to life and our environment, but are being rapidly destroyed through salination, landslides, intensive farming, chemical contamination and erosion.
Sean Bailey's three modestly scaled paintings, Fallen Debris I, II and III, reference the leaf litter on the artist's daily walks, the quiet contemplation of the individual experience of nature. The gnarly surfaces of these works combine both a dark industrial aesthetic and a moulded, textural idea of the ground. Essentially abstract, Bailey's works over the years also allude to the influence of Paganism and nature-focused belief systems – this is often referenced through embedded and occluded symbolism and through titles referencing the natural world. Key tensions in his works are between order and disorder, decay and renewal.
These themes of regeneration are also evident in Eloise Kirk's installation of six sculptures, which are reminiscent of geological forms or the detritus of construction. They are formed through a process of destruction and assemblage, breaking and reforming chunks of concrete and plaster and melding them with ceramic forms and elements of collage. Kirk writes, "Through the process of hammering, chiseling, smashing and plastering, the works speak to me about materiality, the destructive nature of industry and the natural resources under foot. I am interested in using raw materials, remains and forms that surround me and linger at the edges and under surface layers of my immediate reality. As well as taking a critical eye to environmental issues and the over consumption of natural resources, my practice explores elements of hope and a playful reforming of that which is unsuccessful, cast aside or decayed."
Wona Bae and Charlie Lawler's collaborative works explore materiality and abstraction. Radius has been created with charcoal, a material associated with healing qualities of detoxification, filtration and purification, as well as the destruction and regeneration of nature through fire. In Bae and Lawler's works, charcoal is used symbolically and physically to purify and detoxify, regenerating and energising the surrounds. The 140 panels comprising Radius bear a repeating circular form in charcoal pigment. Throughout their work, the circular form is used as symbolic of harmony, balance, and the cycle of life. The viewer’s perception of the work’s material shifts, the deep pigment absorbing light and reading front on as a solid mass, and then revealing its more subtle textures and patterns, shifting with the play of light as the viewer moves around the work.
Grant Nimmo's The hard world is a scene from the Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park, painted from a photograph taken in the Park whilst hiking in 2016. Nimmo's works are exquisitely rendered and full of the beauty of wild nature. The hard world is situated in the dark and mossy, dank undergrowth of the forest, with sunlight entirely obscured by dense growth. Many areas are painted black and the painting recedes into an unknown depth. Formally, this engages with devices of the sublime, particularly as it has historically been applied in landscape painting of Australian rainforests. The viewer is positioned to be overwhelmed by nature — the horizon is obliterated, and the framing cannot contain the trees depicted. The work aims to represent the beauty of nature and its darker forces, and is shown devoid of people but alive with energy. The ambiguous sense of threat that is often present in Nimmo's work, in this painting is human — the Franklin being the site of one of the country's most significant conservation battles.
Alice Wormald's oil paintings for O Horizon have been created through a complex studio process, in which she first collages found imagery and photographs garnered from various sources, including gardening magazines and books of nature photography. Fragments of these source materials are manipulated through cutting, inversion and flipping, to create new arrangements that use compositions from other found images. Finally, Wormald paints a work based on the collage composition. The works combine multiple perspectives into the one image, disrupting expectations of landscape and still life painting, horizon lines, foregrounds and backgrounds, creating works where rules of gravity and horizons fade, and planes float freely and intersect. The works play deliberately with our perception of surface and depth, with painted openings giving forth disorienting, abstracted views.
Matt Arbuckle's 16m long painted installation, Vice Versa, was created on the 16m length of driveway at his family's home in Glenlyon in country Victoria. The secondary colours of green, orange and purple in the work bring it into conversation with Arbuckle's earlier work, Recto-Verso, which was painted over the driveway of his Auckland home in primary colours of red, yellow and blue. Together the two works speak to the artist's ties to both Australia and New Zealand, of his current primary and secondary homes.
Vice Versa is marked by the rivulets of dye running into and around furrows, gravel and bumps of the earth. Rather than being a painting of landscape, it is a literal imprint of landscape, bearing the marks of the place of its making. In O Horizon the work has peeled off from the ground plane, dancing across the space, suspended by wooden planks. Each of these painted planks was also a part of the work's process, acting to weight the work on the driveway as it was created. The work tells of home and connection, with colour and texture tracing a memory of the experience of place.
Kate Tucker's hybrid painting/sculpture works are formed through a process of accumulation and layering of refuse from years of studio work. Each tablet-shaped painting is built through wrapping, painting and coating multiple layers of pieces of previous paintings, calico, canvas, batik fabric from a 2016 artwork, paint and acrylic mediums.
Tucker describes this process: "The elements that make up these paintings have all been unearthed. Like leaf litter in the O horizon, they are layered, cut up and broken down until they no longer resemble themselves. They are also fused into a mass — the bronze bases reference geological forms visually but the paintings point back to it through their compression and immersion into one another. The various methodologies I regularly draw on have made their way into this series, with patchwork and digitally printed images of previous works included. The newer painted sections (a leaf section, an abstracted horizon, angled buildings) are loose, acting as binders for the range of elements pulled from years of paintings. The paintings draw on a vast sample of periods and activities, presenting fragments that have evolved across time. Disparate elements appear to have co-evolved, blending the natural and manufactured into self-supporting relics of studio process across time."
Bronwyn Dillon is a palawa artist, shell-stringer and weaver, with deep cultural ties to the lunawanna-alonnah (Bruny Island) area. In palawa kani Dillon is a muka nawnta — a saltwater sista. Dillon has been taught to weave by the women of her community, carrying on the knowledge and skills of her elders. Her ties are to both the land and sea surrounding lunawanna-alonnah, and her weaving incorporates materials directly foraged from the surface of the land and coast, grasses as well as possum fur and shells. Dillon's baskets combine traditional techniques and contemporary interpretations, the characteristic close-woven stitch of traditional palawa baskets with decorative elements of shells, feathers and fur, also drawing from the palawa tradition of shell stringing.
Dillon's weaving work is a deeply personal and cultural practice. Each woven basket is a commemorative work, often named for the person and occasion it is dedicated to. rrala (Strong) is dedicated to her mother’s strength, others named pliri and luwana are ‘Aboriginal boy’ and ‘Aboriginal girl’.
Looking at these baskets reminds me of words from Jazz Money's poem, ‘how to make a basket’ — "her basket is safety / everything worth holding in two hands / has a perfect basket to respond" (Money). A particularly special basket, pulawini (ochre), holds an abalone shell and remnants of ochre — this basket is actively used in family ceremonies. Dillon writes, “My baskets are not empty, they are filled with the deepest connection to my old people, they are filled with my blood memories of a time long before me that I should not know and understand, but I do, because it runs through my veins.”
— Daine Singer, 2022
Evans, Matthew. Soil, The incredible story of what keeps the earth, and us, healthy. Murdoch Books, 2021
Money, Jazz, How to make a basket. University of Queensland Press, 2021
Solnit, Rebecca. Orwell’s Roses. Granta Books, 2021
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