i have had the privilege of seeing dawn and dusk bite through daylight hours
ARRYN SNOWBALL 1
12 May - 30 May , 2021
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677 i have had the privilege of seeing dawn and dusk bite through daylight hours trolling beneath the crowd i prefer using three lines – one short and shallow, the second deeper, and the third deepest and longest their number increases deeply incurved straight-edged and willingly much smaller this fashion is leaving the water, chilled upon capture, and left beneath damp sacking the great jaws open to form a diamond-shaped box Nathan Shepherdon 2017
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For the last few years I’ve painted in response to a body of poems by Nathan Shepherdson. Nathan wrote the seventy-seven Slack Water poems in 2017, using Grant’s Guide to Fishes as material and ground. Nathan draws on Ern Grant’s marvellous language, to build a strange universe with its own peculiar physics, where the relationship between fish and fisherman, sky and horizon, surface and body, are inverted, fragmented and re-imagined. Grant’s epic Guide has over eight hundred pages, each page about a different fish. The title of each poem is a page number, and each poem is made from words found in the text on that fish. The poems are powerful, abstract, visceral, and the ocean swells within them. In late 2017, I started by painting text from the poems, playing with the rhythm of words and allowing the patterns of letters to evolve into abstract painting. I started working with colour for the first time in many years. Working from the Slack Water poems gave me a different access to the Pacific than what a more literal approach might have done. I sunk into them. Shepherdson’s poetic images tangled with my memories of fishing on the coast as a kid, of time spent out on the reef, on beaches, headlands, tidal flats, at mouth of estuaries. I do not paint a determined image, but rather follow an open process, out of which the image emerges. I make the paint from raw pigments, egg, linseed oil and resins. The paintings in this exhibition all began with a loose grid. The net-like structure frames the colour and gives movement through repetition and variation. Each session I work across the whole canvas, each time hoping that the painting will emerge. I paint simply, layering line over colour, colour over line, colour over colour. At some point, the painting becomes its own thing, able to hold itself up, something more than lines and colour. When it starts to breathe, I stop. The finished paintings are rarely what I expect. It’s an open process, and can change at any point. If I get stuck, I look for more clues in the poems. I think of these paintings as traps for light and colour, as nets of rhythm and movement, as vessels to hold the poet’s metaphors and the meanings that might be found in them. I imagine these paintings as atmospheres at different times of day, as fragments of sky and horizon. I imagine reflections from above and below the water. I imagine the pull of the wind and the tide, the glare across the shallows and the glint in the depths. I pretend that I’m pulling the surface of the water up unto the wall, to make a window across hemispheres. I pretend these are the windows of a fish chapel to offer prayers for the suffering reef and coast. I pretend these windows are also mirrors that reflect the ocean within. This process has been my fishing while here in Berlin, my contact with the Pacific coast, with home. I titled of the exhibition from one of Nathan’s poems, i have had the privilege of seeing dawn and dusk bite through daylight hours. It’s one of my favourite lines. I like to imagine dawn and dusk as the teeth of night, biting through the day. I too, am grateful for all the sharp dawns and savage sunsets I’ve seen.
Arryn Snowball 2021
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2 he would spend his life waiting for dead men’s shoes he shifted across harbours where he remained until spilling over a bed of living construction in steadily-expanding editions of time he still describes himself as a box unable to gain the measure of acceptance
Steadily expanding editions of time: When I took Moni out in Michael’s tinny, just off Dingo Bay. The clear sky of the calm day reflected the crystal water between the tides. I like those moments with no current, when the blue above and the blue below are held in tension on the mirror surface. This painting is dedicated to my battered blue bicycle, Tick Tick. As we ride, Tick Tick spins a cathedral of rhythm from the racket of tacks and clacks that echo down the street.
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Steadily expanding editions of time, 2021, tempera and oil on linen, 190 x 190cm
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670 its severity is out of all proportion to the size of the wound the immersion of the hand in hot water and ammonia does not bring relief the body may darken and lighten alternately a close-set pattern can flush and wane the pain moving up my coastline i well remember vanishing within two seconds
in another red body: When they used to burn the sugarcane in Innisfail, the smoke and afternoon thunderstorms would sometimes mix with the last sun and light the whole sky on fire; red as blood, red as body, red as being. Here in Berlin, I have a red light in my bathroom. I watch the ruby droplets as they condense in the mist on the shower glass. If this painting is a mirror, perhaps it reflects the body inside-out, or perhaps it’s the dusk outside-in.
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In another red body, 2021, tempera and oil on linen, 190 x 190 cm
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694 as high as the body is deep from side to side to stun or kill to the total exclusion i have come so close to wondering whether the tetraodotoxin in its colouration in its performance shading to the palest pink an array of narrow bars unusually rough to the touch where both gloved hands are used to grasp the sail
Tetraodontoxin: TTX is a potent neurotoxin, a sodium channel blocker that inhibits the firing of action potential in neurons. This prevents the nervous system from carrying messages, and muscles from contracting in response. TTX is extremely toxic; one thousandth of a gram can be fatal. There is no antidote. Its name derives from Tetraodontiformes, an order that includes pufferfish, porcupinefish, ocean sunfish, and triggerfish. TTX is actually produced by symbiotic bacteria, and several other animals also carry the toxin as a defence mechanism, including the blue-ringed octopus, roughskinned newts, and moon snails.
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Tetraodontoxin, 2021, tempera and oil on linen, 190 x 190cm
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306 it is uniformly so vivid that the body inclines towards or away from the viewer graceful filaments confer upon the diamond itself saline glows gold as the body equal black its travelling-companion mirrors lie on their sides
Mirrors lie on their sides: I’d wake in the dark and head down to the beach, with a flask of coffee, a line and a bucket. I’d cast and wait for day to break like this. I’d fish the dawn and catch a bream for breakfast. I’d watch the salt in the air catch the first light. For a second, the sky and ocean are a mirror mirage, where you can find your own horizon. In such moments, you’re connected to the dawn bream by more than just the line and hook in the mouth.
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Mirrors lie on their sides, 2021, tempera and oil on linen, 190 x 190cm
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439 over their chosen principle, the exclusion of the apparently-similar nearby they move up towards night as the surface progresses; and quite apart from locating itself, one lies in getting the precise depth at which they are bending heavy hitches to my line, so i can return to my chosen depth without guesswork, adjusting the depth always according to the ground nowadays, night-caught numbers can be separated immediately on form always curved inwards always curved outwards
Night caught numbers: When it’s the dark of the moon and you’re night fishing off Gloucester Island. You’re in the lee of the reef and the only sound is a drip in the rigging. You lean out the boat to count the luminescent algae glittering in the depths. When you’re floating in the indigo, there is no horizon. Nothing separates the sky from water, the algae from stars. Whether high or deep, all are caught in the web of the galaxy spider.
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Night caught numbers, 2021, tempera and oil on linen, 190 x 190cm
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Rare Sun (1 - 30, top left to bottom right),2021, watercolour mounted on board, 24 x 17cm (each).
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Slack Water This exhibition is part of the Slack Water collaboration, a creative project on the Pacific Ocean, involving fish, poetry, painting, and a peculiar physics. It is an open work that deals with process and connection, light and water, horizon and body, complexity and meaning, abstraction and being. I’d like to thank my collaborators on this project and friends on both sides of the mirror who have made this exhibition possible in these difficult times: Monica Vasile, Karla Marchesi, Sofia Karagiorgou Stephen Russell, Felix Korganow, Jose Serrano, Pedro Almiro, Hinnerk Utermann, Adrienne Rodewaldt, Thomas and Bo Henriksson, Heidrun Sebdji, Kahl and the Monticones, Mat and the Beguns, Kerrie Ann Roberts, Ross Brooke, Sarah Ducker, Nicholas Thompson, MoB, Jonathan McBurnie, Megan Williams, Archer Davies, Benjamin Werner, Jan Manton and Taylor Hall. Special thanks to Nathan Shepherdson, for the Slack Water poems and the ocean they dream, and to Ern Grant, for your magnificent Guide to Fishes that invites such reverie. —Arryn Snowball, May 2021 19
Credits Artwork: Arryn Snowball Poetry: Nathan Shepherson Text: Arryn Snowball Photography: Ana Nsue & Arryn Snowball Design: Taylor Hall Image (Page 2): Studio photograph, with Grant’s Guide to fishes and various works, 2021 Image (Page 18): Artist’s studio, Arryn with Stephen Russell, 2021.
Gallery Director Jan Manton Gallery Manager Taylor Hall 54 Vernon Terrace, Teneriffe QLD 4005 info@janmantonart.com janmantonart.com 0419 657 768 © The artist and authors All rights reserved. Apart from fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior permission in writing of the publishers.
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