Critics Masterclass

“Air: the fluid which we breathe and which surrounds the earth. It is invisible, inodorous, insipid, transparent, compressible and ponderable”
Oxford Medical Dictionary

“Air: archaic for breath”
Collins Dictionary

“Listen for the air”
Nursing Manual 1955

The tidal flow; the volume of breath inspired and expired in each normal, quiet respiratory cycle. This unobtrusive, normal conversion and exchange.

There is here a breathing space, an intuition of air. There is another unseen process taking place, a metabolic one of conversion, change and production. In certain works- those of, Janet Laurence, Bronwyn Oliver, Tom Muller and Hossein Valamanaesh – there’s an attentiveness to the nature of this process, to the change from form to form, to the physical forms and materiality of this transfiguration and to the works own materiality.

There is a kind of unfixedness, a fragility in each that evokes the process and connects each work to the next in a kind of transformative chain.

Heartwood is the soft tissue core of the tree, the conduit for the great chemically bonded chains of water molecules that the tree sends surging (at lineal metres per day) around its body. From where it sucks the moisture from the earth to the exchange of oxygen for carbon dioxide from the leaves, the liberation of water from its molecular chains back into the world as a gas. Over and over, in each quiet normal respiratory cycle. An injury to the heartwood, any disruption breaks this chain of water, endangering the tree.

Be alert for air hunger, for the labouring of breath, the increase or decrease in frequency and depth that marks the breakdown in the lungs capacity to convert and exchange. Be alert for this failure.

There is breath here and injury as well.

A massive gum branch, Lemon Scented (Corymbia Citrodora) falls out from the gallery wall. It has, in its extremity exuded scores of long, pliable IV tubes stoppered with glass vessels, the way that trees exude sap to cover a wound. Like its own vascular system thrown inside out. Some tubes ends in phials, closed, conserving, saving the trees own fluids. Others end in glass funnels, hanging down, as if to concentrate and collect the ground water and dew. A tree gasping for breath, for water.

Janet Laurence Heart Shock 2008
( Pruned lemon scented gum  silicon tubing, glass vials, pigments in oil and water)
Installation and detail views
photo: ©Douglas Sheere
Courtesy Galerie Dusseldorf website

In Heart Shock Janet Laurence gives us the wounded tree (broken and bolted together again in the gallery) taking over our systems and implements to survive.

Life stilled, or stilling.

In between breaths.

Carbon Heart, might be the reserve, the supplementary air. A deeply burnt tree in a burnt landscape appears on large, square transparencies, the image reflected, softened, made indistinct against the mounts of metal, mirror and burnt wood. The tree, literally shocked to the core, hung about again with IV tubes and coloured fluids, seems wounded beyond help.

Yet it shows signs of regeneration already, vivid green branchlets spring out from nubs on its sides and I’m reminded that on this continent these plants need fire for their regeneration. This, I think is a Banksia, whose cones you can heat in an oven til the seeds snap.

And yet, even with this hopeful knowledge, this is nature in extremis and the depth of the falsity of our fantasies of an infinitely robust, endlessly resilient nature is undeniable.

Each is an event held in stasis momentarily. One breath does not necessarily follow the next. But might.

The held moments of Carbon Heart andHeart Shock connect deeply with the concentrated and profound stillness of Bronwyn Oliver’s work. Work that I cannot see now without a sharp and particular sadness that seems contained in and inseparable from such rigorously elegant forms.

Oliver’s works Warp and Stroke appear as an refined extraction of plant forms, as if she has reproduced and magnified the complex internal structure of the plant but also distilled the essence of its living force. Almost conical they grow from a point to an open funnel like end, the intricate patterns and the weight of the meticulously welded copper wires giving them a fixedness that belies the fluidity of their sinuous, curving forms.

Form, material and process speak of air enclosed, of matter cleaving together, of circulation and flow. They are at once both airy and monumental.

In their shadows these forms bloom and flourish on the walls behind, as if, freed from the weight of metal, they continue this complex system of elemental exchange, of the vegetal circulation embodied in their forms.