Landscapes from a new perspective
Warren Feeney investigates an exhibition which aims to reflect and respond to our relationship with nature and landscapes.
Over the past 60 years, landscape painting as a subject has often been derided by sections of the professional art world.
It began in the 1950s, as an increasingly confident modern movement, influenced by artists such as Cezanne, Matisse and Rothko, began to capture the attention of New Zealanders.
The legacy of traditional landscape paintings by popular artists, including Peter McIntyre, Cedric Savage and Douglas Badcock, came to reside in erroneous perceptions that these painters were holding back the country’s art, limiting the careers of abstract artists such as Milan Mrkusich, or expressionist painters like M T Woollaston, whose work explored the landscape’s potential.
Yet, more recently, there has been a substantial shift in thinking about landscape as a subject for contemporary art. Ma¯ ori and Pasifika artists in the early 2000s – John Walsh, Star Gossage and John Pule – all made work that represented alternative relationships with the landscape that existed beyond the frames and constructs of Western art and culture.
In its title, the group exhibition New Perspectives on Landscape at the Ashburton Art Gallery encompasses a similar spirit and intention. It presents the work of five recent MFA graduates from the Dunedin School of Art: Robyn Bardas, Miranda Joseph, Hannah Joynt, Sue Pearce and Fiona Van Oyen. All are conscious of the politics and history of their subject and its increasing potential to contribute to debate about environmental, personal and political relationships with nature within the context of contemporary arts practice.
New Perspectives is curated by Clive Humphreys. It is a touring exhibition from the Dunedin School of Art and he maintains that there are good reasons for this reconsideration. With the acceleration of ‘‘urbanisation, population growth and environmental threat, we live in a world where much of our ‘natural’ environment seems increasingly remote, removed from our responsibility in some realm of exoticism or otherness’’.
‘‘The commonality for the artists in New Perspectives has been a questioning of the Western Art landscape canon and how new and urgent sensibilities about the sustaining role of the environment might be addressed through an image. Each artist has attempted to move from the concept of place as ‘somewhere else’ in favour of ‘here’ – implied in terms of connectedness and responsibility.’’
Bardas’ immense landscapes map out the attitude that New Perspectives embodies. They surround and encircle the gallery visitor, but do so to encourage reflection on the complexities of how we view the world. Bardas says the ‘‘marketing of the New Zealand landscape forgets that it represents, mostly, a postindustrial Anglicised landscape.
‘‘Landscape describes colonialism. My praxis is informed by my Jewish and Australian heritage and integration into the Wanaka community. New Zealand is no longer mono-cultural, and each immigrant sub-culture experiences the landscape from individual viewpoints, bringing filters of belonging, dislocation, deep connection and gratitude.
‘‘We are tainted by postindustrial effects on the land and yet relate personally and privately to our quiet and bodily experience of it. My painted photographic works are particular and localised to slices of roadside landscape in Central Otago, where I live. I consider the ways that horizontal lines in painting can locate or disrupt the viewer in place, time and spirit.’’
Christchurch-based printmaker and installation-artist van Oyen traces the origins of her current work, and images like I think this is part of our garden, to February 2011, as well as her mother’s deteriorating health.
‘‘Sir Sydney Moko Mead wrote: ‘Without the fixed grid of named features we would be total strangers on the land – lost souls with nowhere to attach ourselves’. Watching my mother in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease, I witnessed the effect of not knowing the ‘where-ness’ or ‘of-ness’ of places. That’s my own sense of loss for places in our city. So it is the optical, the whiteness – the there but not there – alongside the need to describe minute detail in the places that I know that determines my current aesthetic.’’
Pearce identifies the influence and consequence of ‘‘place’’ as critical to her practice.
‘‘I focus on land, rather than landscape and this has meant a shift in my thinking and approach to subject matter. I select specific sites that I relate to, often alpine native flora and fauna. The painting process has developed from this relationship with place and trying to capture the experience of being present in a place, rather than as a distant idealised construction of nature created as a vehicle for an exhibition. Although we are all dealing with this notion of place, the differences and the contrasts between methodologies, materiality and techniques give rise to a dialogue about the personal and the local.’’
Joynt exhibits two distinct series of works in New Perspectives, both linked through a commitment to drawing and the natural world.
‘‘I am obsessed with drawing and it is my way to bring nature close to me. Drawing has become my way to try and hold onto the essence of my landscape experiences. As contemporary urban dwelling folk, we have become so fractured and disconnected from nature and this sense of being immersed in a natural environment. ‘My practice encompasses a broad spectrum of drawing methods, materials and techniques: Square format-framed pastel drawings and larger cut-out works, and there is an intentional materialistic and aesthetic disparity between them.
‘‘I am attracted to traditional drawing and sketching plein-air and I am also interested in finding ways to bring traditional drawing into a contemporary context. The cut-out wall works are large versions of plein-air sketches, liberating the lines from the page. The gallery wall becomes a placeholder for paper. I rub charcoal, pastel or Indian ink into the surface of the cut lines to make a material connection with traditional drawing, yet it rests on a support of a contemporary material – MDF.’’
Joseph acknowledges the land and environment as an ever more pressing concern in our everyday lives. ‘‘Painting can suggest looking and pose questions about how we look and what we see – looking as an intentional and deliberate action. What I want to say in a painting is about light and how it penetrates the natural and architectural world, creating a unique language of pattern and shapes which describe the relationship between figure and ground.
‘‘My paintings in New Perspectives all have an element of an inside architectural space reflected onto the outside of tree forms. All the artists in this exhibition are answering the same question: ‘when the landscape compels a response, how can we acknowledge the history of painting and art theory to provide critical integrity and validity to our response’.’’
❚ Robyn Bardas, Miranda Joseph, Hannah Joynt, Sue Pearce and Fiona Van Oyen, New Perspectives on Landscape, Ashburton Art Gallery, 327 West St, until January 14.