BLAZE FOURTEEN @ CCAS (2020)

BLAZE FOURTEEN

Canberra Contemporary Art Space Board and Staff respectfully acknowledge the traditional custodians of the Canberra and the ACT region, the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples on whose unceded lands our galleries are located; their Ancestors, Elders past and present; and recognise their ongoing connections to Culture and Country. We also respectfully acknowledge all traditional custodians throughout Australia whose art we have exhibited over the past 37 years, and upon whose unceded lands the Board and Staff travel.

BLAZE FOURTEEN ROMANY FAIRALL BELLE PALMER HARIJS PIEKALNS RACHEL THEODORAKIS

CURATED BY ALEXANDER BOYNES DAN TOUA

BLAZE FOURTEEN Every year Canberra Contemporary Art Space (CCAS) exhibits the best of the region’s emerging contemporary artists in a survey called BLAZE. Artists previously exhibited in the annual exhibition have gone on to participate in prestigious exhibitions interstate and overseas including Primavera at the Museum of Contemporary Art, The Sydney Biennale and The National Digital Portrait Prize. BLAZE has become synonymous with propelling local artists onto the national and international stage, and is a highly sought after entrée into the art world for recent graduates.

Now in its fourteenth iteration, this years’ edition of BLAZE was almost a non-starter. Scheduled to open on February 28, 2020, all production ground to a halt when it was clear that COVID-19 was not a seasonal flu. By the time the virus was declared a global pandemic in March, CCAS had already decided that it was safest to shut the doors and wait until it was safe for everyone to participate.

It was a gut-wrenching disappointment to all involved: the artists, the curators, our Board and the Canberra art community. After 32 years at Gorman Arts Centre we made the move to the Parliamentary Triangle, and for the first time CCAS was positioned to provide a dedicated space for contemporary art amongst the national institutions on the foreshore of Lake Burley Griffin.

It was meant to be the party of 2020: celebrating CCAS’ new gallery space on the waters edge with a punchy showcase of experimental, edgy and fresh work, but instead people everywhere were forced inside and the world was put on pause. Eventually opening the doors in September, this year’s artists had the false security of an extra six months of production time before the opening. Faced with that much leeway in a timeline, there are only two outcomes: slowly and steadily building on what you already have, or an explosive and hopefully creative dash to the finish line.

This version of BLAZE brings together four artists who have graduated from the Painting and Sculpture Workshops at the Australian National University’s School of Art & Design (ANU SOA+D). They have participated in exhibitions around Canberra over the past year - in contour 556, at the ANU School of Art, Belconnen Arts Centre, CCAS Manuka, the Gallery of Small Things, M16 Art Space, Megalo Print Studio + Gallery, Smith’s Alternative and Tributary Projects, and also have been recipients of the Capital Arts Patrons Organisation Emerging Artist Prize and the ANU Emerging Arts Support Scheme award.

BLAZE FOURTEEN is the first show at CCAS’s new home: curated by Alexander Boynes and Dan Toua, the exhibition features Romany Fairall, Belle Palmer, Harijs Piekalns and Rachel Theodorakis. What brings this show together, apart from fitting the loose criteria of showcasing the best of local emerging art, is the obsessive nature of all the works.

Meticulously woven, glued, drawn and stenciled, the past year has forced us to stay in our houses and reflect on our inner worlds, and has no doubt encouraged obsessive practices to sustain us through a significantly difficult time.

Through researching culture and tradition, Rachel Theodorakis delves into themes of permanence, transition and identity for her works in BLAZE FOURTEEN. Shrine of Edification (2020) is a delicate hanging installation of small objects, and dominates the Front Space. On first glance it looks as if the objects are suspended in the air, and if you look out the large floor-to-ceiling windows they almost disappear into Lake Burley Griffin. The 52 pieces are each carefully placed on clear acrylic discs, which are suspended by almost invisible lines that disappear into the ceiling. Theodorakis has used a basket weaving technique to tightly veil each one in a layer of black cotton thread that has been dipped in bee’s wax.

The installation has been designed to walk through, in three almost concentric spirals that tighten as you circle in towards the middle of the shrine. The objects are hanging at different heights, creating a maze, with a Selenite crystal spiral delicately placed at the peak of the installation. Selenite is said to dispel negative energy and enhance clarity, and there is a calmness that radiates from the apex of the installation down across the other objects below.

Despite the calm, there is also a fraught energy when you’re in the midst of the woven forms: as the spirals constrict the installation forces you to focus on where you are, and observe the objects and their weave. As the usual instant recognition is removed by the weave, the viewer has to pause to think of what they could be, where they came from and what their story is, and to leave the installation a little bit more edified.

Each object has been meticulously chosen from Theodorakis’ travels around the world, and symbolise inherent cultural traits or lessons learned through her life experiences. Theodorakis has obsessively enshrined each item in an almost ritualistic process, which elevates them to a point of worship. She has also placed them in a particular order, curating a story of life experiences that the viewer can meander through, which also provides a space for self-reflection, and investigation of the viewers own life journey.

Also in the Front Space is Omega (2020). For this work, Theodorakis has used kangaroo carpals and metacarpals (‘paw’ bones) and has encased them in her delicate weaving technique. The bones are installed in low relief against an expansive white wall in the shape of the omega. Like Shrine of Edification this work is comprised of small objects in a cavernous space, yet demands attention by drawing you in, forcing you to get up close and investigate.

It has been a long time coming - Theodorakis started exploring the wrapping of bone as icons of self in her Honours project, and further developed this idea as a journey of transition in her exhibition Ελευθερία (Freedom) at M16 Art Space in 2018. In that exhibition each kangaroo bone was wrapped with 24 layers of weaving, and symbolised one year of a past significant relationship, and ‘they express not the events but the emotional response to the events’1.

It is fitting, then, that Omega is a piece that signifies the artist coming ‘full circle’. Omega is the 24th and final letter in the Modern Greek alphabet, and signifies the end / the last / the ultimate. For Theodorakis this piece signifies the end of this particular body of weaving work, and as the artist puts it, ‘with this end there follows a new beginning’.

1

M16 - Past Exhibitions: ‘My Story’ by Rachel Theodorakis, accessed 26/09/20

RACHEL THEODORAKIS

Omega 2020, Bone, cotton thread, bee’s wax, 75 x 50 x 10cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie

Shrine of Edification (detail) 2020,

Collected objects, cotton thread, bee’s wax, dimensions variable

Photo by Brenton McGeachie

Romany Fairall is a recent graduate from the Painting Workshop at the ANU SOA+D, who makes work that explores how abstracted form and pattern can allude to growth in the organic world, and the environment we live within. In recent years her painting-based practice began to incorporate mixed-media elements and low-relief collage such as pom-poms, jewels and glitter, and for BLAZE FOURTEEN, Fairhall has elevated her particular art form to a point where all of the pieces included are entirely produced with glitter. These works are highly detailed, obsessive in their execution and small by nature, however their diminutive size belies the conceptual concerns held within. Through Fairall’s continued investigation of materials, she has arrived at a visual language that has the ability to catch the eye from a great distance and draw viewers in for an intimate inspection of surface and texture.

Fairall’s collection of works in BLAZE FOURTEEN showcase two different directions of investigation into the physical possibilities of her medium: woven surfaces of alternating colour that resemble hallucinogenic plaid fabric (as in Watermelon, Passionfruit and Pink Apple Weave, 2020) and the body of work that began with the Rainbow Bracket series (1 – 4, 2019), which read like topographical surveys of a psychedelic landscape.

One of the strongest influences on Fairall’s work to date was her experience undertaking an artist residency in Japan at the Shiro Oni Studio, Fujioka, north west of Tokyo in 2019. Prior to this focused period of making, she had been concerned with plants and the body on a 1:1 scale, as an observer standing face to face with her subject. This immersion into a foreign country triggered a refocusing of scale within the work, as she metaphorically zoomed out to take in the mountainous region she was surrounded by. This shift in scale is most notable in Onishi Landscape Study (2019), where layer upon layer of gel-based glitter is built up to form low-relief mountain ranges, the ambient light glistening across the peaks and describing the contours of the land.

Fairall has painstakingly extended this process to mimic geological strata, or as in Weft Belt (2020), what could read as a gently breaking wave seen from above. While producing art made from millions of particles of plastic to call attention to the vulnerability of the environment may seem flippant, it enables Fairall to allude to the subtle play of light across a body of water. While the opulent surface of the work engages us on a superficial level, it gently encourages a deeper reflection on the concerns of Microplastics, our carbon footprint, and the future of our planet.

ROMANY FAIRALL

Watermelon Weave 2020, Glitter and gel medium on board, 44 x 22cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie

ROMANY FAIRALL

Passionfruit Weave 2020, Glitter and gel medium on board, 34 x 33cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie

ROMANY FAIRALL

Rainbow Bracket 1 2020, Glitter and gel medium on board, 20 x 20cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie

ROMANY FAIRALL

Rainbow Bracket 2 2020, Glitter and gel medium on board, 20 x 20cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie

ROMANY FAIRALL

Weft Belt 2020, Glitter and gel medium on board, 40 x 120cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie

Belle Palmer’s practice focuses on interactivity and creating systems that ‘reflect the relationship between the artist, the art objects and observers.’2 For BLAZE FOURTEEN Palmer has had to adjust her approach to her making due to COVID-19, but continues her free flowing, kinetic mark making.

As you leave the Front Space, guarding the corridor leading to the back of the gallery is Results of Symbiosis 2 (2019), a towering scroll that is mounted at the top of the wall and unfurls down and out onto the wooden floor below.

The 1.5 metre wide piece is actually the work of many hands: the marks are made by one of Palmer’s interactive drawing machines (which is not displayed) that has been used by many visitors and collected over the course of two exhibitions in 2018 and 2019. The marks are varied, energetic and frantic; many have commented that the longer you look, the more three-dimensional the work appears.

When approached to be included in this year’s BLAZE, Palmer expressed a desire to create a new drawing machine to extend on her ideas of collaborative creation with her audience. Sadly, due to the concerns and restrictions of the pandemic, Palmer decided against building another interactive drawing machine. Adapting in fine form, Palmer has instead created elegant, organic, reed-like drawing implements that use kinetic energy to make marks on handstretched calico canvasses.

When visitors enter the gallery, they have a direct line of sight to Palmer’s drawing implements in one of the back corners of the gallery. There are 18 reed-like drawing implements, hanging in a cluster called [INSERT TITLE HERE] (2020): beautifully crafted, at the top of each implement their ‘handles’ are covered in rope work with thick, yet delicate white cord, and their ends - like ‘pen nibs’ - are encased in a sleek calico sack, bulging ever so slightly with sand.

This installation is accompanied by six large stretched canvasses of calico that dominate the corridor wall. Forgoing viewer participation, Palmer has created each work by placing each canvas underneath her drawing implements, and guiding the elegant pens across their surfaces. Each work has a different energy to them though they were all created using the same black markers, same drawing implements and same method. The marks on Silence (2020) are tightly packed into the centre of the canvas, with many short strokes and horizontal lines cutting up the calico. The work right next to it, Nina (2020), has more circular marks and shapes that cover almost the entirety of the canvas, making it almost black with marker ink. In comparison, one of the other canvases Peggy (2020) is sparse with its squiggles, and it is obvious where Palmer has chosen to let the kinetic energy pause: there are spots of bleeding black where the markers have stopped.

There is one work that has been created with some audience input. Arthur (2020) is filled with the same free-from mark making as the others, but in amongst these marks are a suite of fun, unabashed little drawings by one of Palmer’s friend’s children, Arthur. It’s nice to see this little injection of collaboration, as Palmer’s work is all about viewer participation: Palmer talks about her installations as a tool to capture a trace of the participants interaction through their own action of drawing or painting.

The interactivity in Palmer’s works also invite the audience to view art and installations differently - to question the typical relationship between the viewer and the artist by inviting them into the process. Palmer is interested in the observer within the gallery space, and how they may inform her art-making, which will hopefully return to its collaborative roots as COVID-19 restrictions ease.

2

Belle Palmer – Contact, https://www.bellepalmer.com/contact, accessed 26/09/20

BELLE PALMER

Silence 2020, Marker on stretched calico, recycled timber frame, 120 x 120cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie

BELLE PALMER

Nina 2020, Marker on stretched calico, recycled timber frame, 120 x 120cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie

BELLE PALMER

Eartha 2020, Marker on stretched calico, recycled timber frame, 120 x 120cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie

BELLE PALMER

[INSERT TITLE HERE] 2020, Privet, calico, sand, rope, dimensions variable Photo by Brenton McGeachie

BELLE PALMER [INSERT TITLE HERE] 2020,

Privet, calico, sand, rope, dimensions variable

Silence 2020,

Marker on stretched calico, recycled timber frame, 120 x 120cm

Nina 2020,

Marker on stretched calico, recycled timber frame, 120 x 120cm

Photo by Brenton McGeachie

Harijs Piekalns completed his Master of Visual Arts (Advanced) in painting at the ANU SOA+D in 2018. On paper he may appear to be a recent graduate and emerging artist, however decades of experience in teaching, curatorship, exhibition installation and project management for major artists and institutions around the world has forged his practice into a deeply refined oeuvre, with great understanding of art history and culture. His practice is primarily focussed on what would traditionally fall under the umbrella of painting, however he has also produced photographs, holograms, sculptures and ephemeral installations with great success.

Born in Melbourne with Latvian heritage, Piekalns has lived in Canberra for close to four decades, but has spent a great deal of time on a family property in Rocky Hall on the far South Coast of New South Wales since he was eighteen.

The other property he has had an ongoing connection with for more than 30 years is Ness at Wapengo, once owned

by Manning Clark, and it remains in the Clark family to this day. This region of coast and hinterland is framed by three sacred mountains on the lands of the Yuin people: Balawan (Mount Imlay, behind Eden), Mumbulla (between Wapengo and Bega) and Gulaga (Mount Dromedary, near Tilba Tilba). Piekalns’ connection with this country and his relationship with the Australian environment has been formative to his practice, most notably traditional ochre sites, which he has come to recognise and respect for their significance in Aboriginal society. In recent years Piekalns has been using ochres primarily collected from this region in combination with pre-modern techniques and iconography from his Latvian heritage, to make paintings that seek to reveal the landscape in abstract form.

One of the major works presented by Piekalns in BLAZE FOURTEEN is a large, site-specific painting and installation piece entitled Earth Lighting Thunder (2020), a tessellating series of geometric icons derived from meditations on the grid, Latvian pre-Christian and pre-alphabet runes (symbols). Across the floor loose ochre pigments have been meticulously stencilled into shallow galvanised steel trays to represent the symbol for lightning. At the point where the floor meets the wall, the pigment has been bound with an emulsion to form paint, and applied to timber panels, echoing the motif from the ground as it approaches the sky. One of the strengths in Piekalns’ work lies in the subtlety with which he uses his materials, and this work is an excellent example. The gentle transition from unblended ochre so finely sieved that it appears as a felt surface, to the subtle shift in colour and intensity as the same pigment is transformed into paint and echoed up the wall, deserves sustained looking. The sensitivity with which the materials are handled and their restraint in application allows contemplation on the origins of the land they are borne from, and the cultural significance of 65,000 years of continuous Aboriginal existence in this country. It is Piekalns’ personal belief that the spirit of the land is transmuted through the use of these earth pigments, and each is an implicit representation of the landscape or Country from which it originates.

The Sentinel suite (1, 2 and 3, 2019), again uses a visual language most akin to the formalities of mid-20th Century Modernism, and acknowledges the example of artists such as Piet Mondrian, Ad Reinhardt and Agnes Martin. As Robert Smithson ruminates, and Piekalns agrees: Abstraction is a non-figurative ‘representational’ metaphor where a ‘logical picture’ rarely looks like the thing it stands for. It is a two-dimensional analogy or metaphor—A is Z. 3

3

Robert Smithson, “A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites (1968),” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. ed. Jack Flam (California: University of California Press, 1996), 364.

HARIJS PIEKALNS

Sentinel 2 2019, Kiah Inlet earth pigment bound in emulsion, Gesso Sottile emulsion on linen, 193 x 81cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie

HARIJS PIEKALNS

Sentinel 1, Sentinel 3 2019, Kiah Inlet earth pigment bound in emulsion, Gesso Sottile emulsion on linen, 193 x 81cm Photo by Brenton McGeachie

HARIJS PIEKALNS Earth Lightning Thunder 2019, Earth pigments bound in emulsion, Gesso Sottile emulsion on birch faced plywood panels, 180 x 30cm

Earth Lightning Thunder 2020, Earth pigments bound in emulsion, Gesso Sottile emulsion on birch faced plywood panels,

pigment powder sieved to 0.0125mm, galvinised steel trays, sand, Plaster of Paris, 360 x 360 x 60cm

Photos by Brenton McGeachie

HARIJS PIEKALNS Looking for a Red 2 2020,

9 NSW Far South Coast earth pigments, Gesso Sottile ground on birch faced plywood panel, 30 x 30cm

Light Fills the Vessel 2020, Lake Wapengo earth pigments bound in emulsion, Gesso Sottile emulsion on birch faced plywood panel faced with linen, 30 x 30cm Photos by Brenton McGeachie

HARIJS PIEKALNS

Morning Star 2020, Lake Wapengo earth pigments bound in emulsion, Gesso Sottile emulsion on linen, 30 x 30cm

Morning Star (Variation) 2020, Lake Wapengo earth pigments bound in emulsion, Gesso Sottile emulsion on linen, 30 x 30cm Photos by Brenton McGeachie

Scholar, Christoph Cox expresses a view similar to the artist in providing this contemporary interpretation of abstraction: Instead of asking of an image, text or sound what it means or represents, we ought to ask what it does, how it operates, what changes it effectuates, what forces it channels, and how it affects bodies conceived not as signifying subjects but as themselves collections of material forces.4 However, with that in mind, simplifying them down to such a distilled description does the work great injustice, and removes the process from the equation, which is an essential element. As with all of Piekalns’ works, the paint is produced using techniques developed in Germany and Italy in the 15th Century to hand grind ochre (iron oxide) pigments with oil, wax and emulsions, and the linen is primed with Gesso Sottile as described by Cernino Cerninni in the mid-14th Century. The gesso is made with slaked Plaster of Paris, titanium dioxide and rabbit skin glue, and forms the foundation and interactive base for the subsequent paint layers. It is in these layers of paint that the delicate energy of the works really comes alive, where scuffs and scumbles of pigment are encouraged to dance across the surface, constantly in dialogue with the ground beneath them, gently pulsating within their formally allotted regions of the picture.

In a fortuitous turn of events, Piekalns currently has a major site-specific work on show by the foreshore of Lake Burley Griffin for the biennial contour 556 public art festival. Open Cube (2020) sees a return to the land for the artist and the materials removed from it, completing the circle back to the environment and his continuing investigation of ephemeral artworks.

The artists in BLAZE FOURTEEN have faced some mammoth setbacks during 2020, and yet, have managed to overcome, excel and create engaging, fresh work. It is hopeful to note that even during the lockdown and the pandemic, art is still being created and presented that excites and inspires, and more than anything, reminds us why experiencing it in the flesh is essential.

More than ever, it is essential that we support our emerging artists at the outset of their careers, as they have chosen one of the toughest fields to forge a path in. CCAS is proud and lucky enough to present these artists in our new home

by Lake Burley Griffin, and provide a dedicated space for contemporary art in the Parliamentary Triangle. With this in mind, we hope that one-day the compelling, provocative, exciting and clever work that we present here will find its way up the hill, and find its place in a national collection.

Alexander Boynes and Dan Toua September 2020

BLAZE FOURTEEN is proudly supported by the National Capital Authority, Canberra 4

Christoph Cox, “Abstraction, 1910-1925”: Cox, in “Abstraction, 1910-1925,” ed. Leah Dickerman OCTOBER 143 (Winter 2013): 31.

BLAZE FOURTEEN Installation, Canberra Contemporary Art Space 2020 Photo by Brenton McGeachie

BLAZE FOURTEEN ROMANY FAIRALL BELLE PALMER HARIJS PIEKALNS RACHEL THEODORAKIS

CURATED BY ALEXANDER BOYNES DAN TOUA

FRIDAY 4TH SEPTEMBER SUNDAY 1ST NOVEMBER 2020

CANBERRA CONTEMPORARY ART SPACE 44 QUEEN ELIZABETH TERRACE, BARTON, CANBERRA ACT 2602 TUESDAY - SUNDAY, 11am - 5pm

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www.ccas.com.au