Some kind of wonderful
Stars Puddled Underfoot Nicola Gower Wallis Bett Gallery, Hobart Until February 5 Price range: $3600-$4800
There’s a real temptation to understand the art of Nicola Gower Wallis as fey, charming confections of magic realist storytelling, but to poke this wonderful art into one basket and leave it there is really doing the work a disservice.
Right up alongside some very endearing vignettes where ducks have sort of romances, or at least delightful afternoon tea liaisons with obsessed pacific seagulls, there’s also a bit of Apocalyptic imagery.
The striking work Stargazing depicts a flaming ball, either a comet or meteor, its bright light bleeding across the vegetation it’s about to crash land in. Flaming stars are almost always understood as portentous and ominous harbingers of great change, and it seems as if much of this show is not so much whimsical, as it is a record of the strange and marvellous times we live in.
Of course, that’s a bit reductive as well – what really stands out about the art of Gower Wallis is how utterly complex it is. There’s beauty, chaos, mundanity and the miraculous all mixed together, painted in a style that’s reminiscent of a lush and spectacular picture book.
One painting, Friday Arvo in Sorell, is filled with story and incident in a truly spectacular fashion – vandalism, arson, and quasi-legal antics are being committed by horses, humans, geese, dogs and seagulls. There is cavorting with abandon. Sorell seems like a wild place, and in truth, Gower Wallis is letting us see what she has. This is something else to consider with the work – whilst there is clearly some kind of embellishment being included, much of what is being shown in these works is based on something that happened.
Gower Wallis sees some amazing detail and incident – the work A New Husband for LBD for instance, is an interpretation of a series of interactions that were observed between a Pacific seagull and a duck. It’s a charming anecdote, a gorgeous picture and it sort of really happened.
The stories and drama are so rich, but so too is the palette of colouration and the methods being utilised. Gower Wallis has an amazing painting style – lines are defined and smooth, with every leaf and blade of grass being patiently defined and distinct. One might get totally lost in the manner in which these paintings are made – the complexity is so enticing. Tones and colours shift with great subtlety, and certain states of natural light are communicated with a rarefied skill – quite aside from her stories and drama, Gower Wallis creates the colours of night and evening with a singular delicacy.
This is wonderful art that acts as a witness, tells tales, relates anecdotes and celebrates all the quirks of existence, large and small.
I thought at first that Gower Wallis was making a world, but in reality, she’s finding wonder, awe and comedy in the reality she experiences, and bringing that delicious, complex narrative, fragmented and glorious, out for us to see as she sees.
She revels in chaos and weirdness, appreciates the magic in the small and the wonders we see every day.