Face value
FROM THE DARKROOM TO THE 3-D PRINTER, SONIA PAYES CONTINUES TO CHALLENGE HERSELF AS AN ARTIST AND EXPLORE PROVOCATIVE NEW THEMES.
ON A STINKING HOT Melbourne day, when propriety is allowed to slip, artist Sonia Payes plays the punctilious host. She fusses around in the kitchen of her Melbourne studio — a late 19th-century structure steeped in the history of its Prahran locale — furnishing shots of good espresso and the full spread of print media relating to previous shows. “Is that aircon too cold, are you feeling a bit hungry?” she asks, fluffing out her luxuriant black mane while worrying about the provision of food. “Sorry, it’s my Jewish mama coming out.” And the role of “mama”, as conversation and art concepts later reveal, is the wellspring of her work — mother as nature, nurturer, procreator and matriarchal figurehead, a small effigy of which she picks up from a kitchen bench and twirls. “This was produced by one of the first 3-D printers,” says Payes, holding up a fourfaced plastic head modelled by the data fed from one of her digital photo files. “It was about 2007 when it was printed and it held the promise of something, but I couldn’t yet find a context.” The question of whether it stems from the fiction of Photoshop or a real person prompts Payes to invite entry into a room papered ››
« with images documenting the multi-decade maturation of the very same face. “My daughter Ilana has performed in front of my camera since she was six,” says Payes, qualifying that her muse is now 34 and expecting her second child. “I wrapped her in plastic in that photo, and now I’m doing her in plastic.” Trying to fix on the when and why of sculpture, Payes ricochets across time and tableaux, stalling at her 2007 immortalisation of 60 home-grown art greats “on old-school film” for Untitled, Portraits of Australian Artists. She makes it clear that planned concepts are of no concern, but uses this book to illustrate the essence of identity through “discomfort” — what can come of the unplanned moment and an adrenalin rush. Indeed, her monastic grab of the notoriously private ceramicist Gwyn Hanssen Pigott attests to this intuition. Before the anecdotes can flow from this era-defining series, Payes has leap-frogged to 2014 and the Queensland Festival of Photography, when her decade-long interrogation into future dystopias was shown under the collective title Re Generation. The link between these series and her sculpture is not explicit, but there is the constant of an individual face, a face that smooths into universality when Payes’ camera hits the digital cloud. “I was in China in 2012,” she says, jumping back to her two months near Beijing as the inaugural recipient of the Australia China Art Foundation residency. “I remember cornfields dissolving into quarries and mountainsides exploding to make way for high-rise developments. China’s relentless regeneration is destroying the planet on which its repetition is reliant. Here was my context.” Capturing this Möbius strip of motherhood in surreally lit landscapes, Payes digitally painted her fourfaced figureheads into endless cornrows that bend to the winds of change. From a distance these freakishly modified crops, commenting on the collective’s diminishment of individualism, glow with the allegoric romanticism of a Caspar David Friedrich landscape, but up close they crystallise into the Cambodian killing fields. “It was one of my best bodies of work,” says Payes, adding that the experience of China afforded the confidence to dive into the next dimension. “Artists in China aren’t defined by a single discipline, so when the McClelland Sculpture Park + Gallery called for submissions for their 2014 sculpture survey, I said, ‘I can do that.’” Giving a literal twist to the figurehead of Re Generation, Payes created a monumental fibreglass form at McClelland. It was a gestural nod to gestation that both pre-empted her daughters’ pregnancies and won the McClelland Achievement Prize. Now preparing for another show at McClelland, Payes draws similarities between her effigy of Ilana and Mut, the multi-faceted Egyptian goddess of womanly arts and motherhood. “Nothing is really new, just a parallel of the past.” Sonia Payes: Parallel Futures runs 3 July–6 November;
Payes digitally painted her four-faced figureheads into endless cornrows that bend to the winds of change