Touch - Closer: group exhibition essay

Touch 2019: Closer

touch

1 August - 12 August

To be opened by Susannah Smith in conversation with Megan Seres

Touch 2019: Closer

What is Touch but an opportunity for an artist to describe human contact at its most elemental? Touch is our very first human sensation, and it is bodily. A touch can be bold or hesitant, vigorous or gentle. Touch is warmth, and we seek it out but it can also be cold, triggering fear or revulsion. Touch is anything from an accidental brush to a full embrace, and at the other extreme, unwanted physical contact. To say of someone that they are touched suggests there is something unhinged and elemental in their being, a state of mind somewhere between mild eccentricity and madness. Indeed, being touched not only describes a physical sensation, it also describes an emotional affect, as when we are touched by a gesture. Then again, to touch can mean to ask for a loan or a favour from someone.

In common it seems, at the kernel of almost every meaning, is that touch affects us by exposing us to greater vulnerability. In other words, touch puts us at risk.

There was the slightest hesitation just as curator Jac Font started to describe Touch. In an exhibition curation otherwise impeccably planned, the pause, seemingly uncharacteristic, was poignant. Like a pause before sensation. As an exhibition Touch is not about a strict curatorial premise, rather it is an assembly of 21 artists invited to create or present works interpreting touch in any way and her hesitation imparted that breadth and freedom. This exhibition expands upon the previous year’s founding exhibition. The artists of Touch describe, suggest, confront or depict the sensation of touch in a variety of ways, yet all refer at some level to the sentient body. In some works this is the artist’s own body or touch, in others the body of a subject, or the gendered body, or even the communal body of shared human experience. Bodies are not only the haptic recipients of touch but are also the site of its lived experience, emotional states and memories; so for visual artists are filled with potential for meaning and metaphor within contemporary life.

Needlework has acquired a biting resonance in current art practice and when stitching and embroidering, touch is everywhere as the needle punctures and narrates. Joy Ivill describes herself as an ‘extroverted recluse’ and this paradox extends to her confessionally emotive embroidery samplers. These pieces are so clearly time consuming in the making yet deliver freewheeling illustrated episodes from the artist’s life with acerbic humour and subversive cultural commentary. The work After Jean-Michel Basquiat combines lists, graffiti-derived heads, narration and daily social media drama in a heady mix of craft and memory as social history.

Megan Seres By intertwining the worlds of Baroque and Colonialism with the here and now I hope to shed light on contemporary themes that include the environment, social structures, identity, gender issues, displacement, isolation, memory, and the negation of the female as ‘Other’.

Hush-Hush - Oil on linen, 76x56cm, 2019

Timba Bridge Bridge makes 3D work inspired by nature, the found object, lifecycles and texture that draw on memories, emotions and desire.

Petis Soins - Bangalow Palm, ostrich egg, sheepskin, twine, 70x51x35cm, 2019

Less directly, abstraction and non-objective pictorial languages enable the depiction of the nuances of touch without necessarily representing the body, but by suggesting or emulating its known states and sensations. Timba Bridge’s sculptural object, Petit soins is a melding of natural materials and uncanny evocations. A large palm husk is made to gently enfold an ostrich egg. The overall form echoes that of pregnancy and carrying - the caring, cradling gesture with which the young are universally held in that first touch. When a literal picturing of a caress is absent, material tactility, appearance and sensory associations of the artworks are amplified and more powerfully convey touch. That fragile barrier of skin, the largest sensory organ is evoked by the Peel works by Alison Duff. Suspended in spirals, these translucent fleshy-coloured kelp and brass strips hang like flayed fragments, hinting at either a past of violence or a future of healing. Duff is fascinated by the meaning inherent in the material properties of kelp, used on skin in the cosmetic industry and as skin in graft tissue fabrication for medical purposes. Lisa Sharp works to uncover meaning from the material traditions of painting, and in Tea and Cinnabar has created a square surrogate canvas that is skin-like in colour and texture. The canvas is made up of stained tea bags, opened and stretched, held together only by a semi-transparent paint layer. The combination of domestic textile and toxic pigment is a reference to the undercurrents that can run beneath human rituals of tea as comfort.

Brutal touch has the potential to mark skin, and can be worn on the body like a bruise. The felt sensation of touch as violence is recorded in Carrie Fraser’s drawn series, #10.1 (2018 (Resistance) in which the artist’s fingerprints are systematically applied to paper in a drawing process that also documents domestic violence incidents (contemporary crime statistics are integrated as part of the drawing system). The fingerprints stand for marks on the body, as well as being marks of the body. The invasive and slightly sinister nature of fingerprints in ink on white paper reads powerfully and visually as a heavy record of the crime of touch.

Jac Font explores the nature of skin as boundary and fragile defence to touch in the series Keeping Up Appearances. Font works at the boundary of non-representational and representational painting, often moving between and questioning the line between the two. However in the work Closer the two strands are combined, a collage and paint combination representation of a female figure impossibly posed, portrayed in a fluid engagement with the dance of liquid paint as spreading pools of colour. The interaction between the ovoid cellular forms, diaphanous colour and the figure implies those circular narratives about how we

Wendy Cohen

Although these works have geometric shapes, there is a tenet of imprecise brush strokes to give an ebb and flow effect of the paint.

Rare Shaped Square - Oil on board, 30x30cm, 2019 Totem Concept Phenomena - Oil on board, two boards 30x30cm, 2019

Fiona Chandler The remarkable Rocks of Kangaroo Island, shaped by a five-hundred-million year battle with the elements: the wind, rain, and sea.

First & Foremost - Watercolour and ink on canvas,120x120cm, 2019

(women) fit in and juggle competing roles and expectations in the world. Herstory, a series by figurative artist Ann Snell continues this dialogue. The painting Visceral Red, almost life size in scale, conveys physicality. Depicted within is the stylised figure of a lone woman, haloed in red, her back bent, all four limbs stretched and attenuated to maintain what appears to be a precarious balance on teetering blocks. It is a pose that suggests strength as well as fragility.

In abstraction, where optical touchings of form, colour and space occur, and where there is no recognition of the external world there is a perceptible shift into metaphor and human allegory. The fluid paint pours of Susie Leahy Raleigh are frozen aftermaths of a moment. They offer a glimpse into the past, one of intense activity, of flowing and mingling, of intensely saturated colour and a certain loss of control. The contrast with the cooler, considered moment of now provides a contrasting perspective from which to observe the effects of touch as collision and mixing. Vivid is a work exploring themes of psychedelia and immersive intoxication.

Another abstract painter, Wendy Cohen uses the language of imperfection as the jostling setting and painterly description of almost-geometric forms, touching, overlapping, layering and appearing to compete for space in a tonally subdued palette. Jo Nolan’s triptych of paintings combine the effects of thin, liquid paint flow with the deliberate marks and scraped gestures of thickly textured paint.

Dark backgrounds have the effect of spotlighting the colour coalescence. Looking closely, the effects of different paint-types touching are clearly discernible, whether as a mingling of flows or as overpaint.

Landscape carries its own heavy layers of cultural and art history. As physical place and artistic convention it provides a means for comment on how we see ourselves within it. Suzy Corcoran photographs her own shadow touching the land in Tread Softly on Country. This is not any land but a particular and specific landscape; one that she has a profound inter-generational connection with.

The image of her shadow, resting lightly yet darkly and lengthened on the land is a story of personal connection and yearning set within the larger story of this country’s pre and post colonial history and attitudes to land. Fiona Chandler’s work, First and Foremost is a reverent study of lined and scarred boulders touched and marked by time, wind, sun and sea. With her touch, the ancient granites soften and lighten into shallow pools of colour, dilute in some places, deeper in others. The shifting and ambiguous exchange between the real, represented landscape and its translation into abstractions of ochre and earth on a white ground can be seen as the universal story of every human connection with land. More personally derived from an interest in the garden as landscape are Doug Schofield’s works, which

Suzy Corcoran My photographic work is based on my connection to the country at Batehaven NSW.

Tread Softly on Country - Digital photograph, 60x70cm, 2019

Alison Duff Peel is a visual metaphor for human flesh, paralleling kelp’s divergent features of fragility and resilience with humanity.

Peel - Kelp, brass shim and aluminium rod, 70x55x20cm, 2019

arise out of his fascination with sites of interaction between humans and nature, or in his own words sites of ‘curated nature’. These paintings and prints reference the memory, experience and rhythms of gardening.

Candid and tender representations of touch are reminders of the significant role touch plays in defining personal and social identity. Megan Seres’ painting Hush-hush explores the notion, sensation and display of touch through emblematised tropes and historical mores from the Baroque period. The soft monochrome palette casts a rosy glow, suggesting nostalgia and historical conventions around femininity and in particular, the artist’s interest in non-sexualised female touch. The lavish attention to detail and textures of the costumes only draws attention to the points of skin-to skin contact between the two figures. Janet Mitsuji’s series of intimate drawings depict the fragmented male body, naming and framing the most sensuous body parts in a grid and titling system mapped as portals of touch – Ear. Nipple. Navel. Lip. Pit. Crown. Buttock. Toe. Eyelid. Back.

Finger. Nape. There is a sense of loving and arousing touch, as if a new lover is moving around a body, reciting its topography in order to come to know it. Hands are perhaps that most sensitive of touch receptors. Jane Gerrish exhibits a pair of finely detailed drawings, embodying the physicality and expressiveness they hold.

One, predominantly in graphite, depicts a singular gesture of hand holding (after Rossetti) while the other is a coloured pencil drawing of Matisse’s hand, paused, holding his pencil, suffused in fuchsia – a contemplation of the ‘touch unique to every artist’s hand and work’.

Digital media allows artists to explore touch as a mediated, haptically alienating visual experience. Julian Wolkenstein’s Touch Liminal, an augmented reality web link presents the arresting image of a human hand, hovering large in a landscape of needle-sharp, digitally sliced blades of grass and sky. The image is compelling as its hyper reality intersects with sensory knowledge; a hand is shown in a seemingly benign and familiar sensory engagement with nature, running a hand over cut grass, in a clearly unreal encounter with a tamed landscape, but also suggesting histories of land conquest. Gary Poulton’s work Like a camera / Red Dot draws out the analogy of sensorial receptivity with photographic capture; fleeting and ephemeral amoebic forms seem to shift and shudder, barely captured on the dark plane. The image conveys the universality of sensory perception, but also the unreliability of constructed ‘reality’. Nicole Sacks’ practice sits between the well plumbed motif of still-life painting and the potential disruption offered by imaging technology. Starting with an image, followed up by digital alteration, before final translation as painting the result renders the corrupted subject uncanny. In this

Jac Font Font’s work examines skin as boundary and fragile defence; the possibility of its penetration is both a source of appeal and horror.

Keeping up Appearances X: Closer - Acrylic and film on polyester, 39.5 x 51.5 x 5cm, 2019

Carrie Fraser Using her body as an instrument, through performance, gesture, and touch, Fraser has created a work to embody Resistance.

#10.1/2018 (Resistance) - (Detail) Ink on Hahnemuhle, 106x78cm, unframed, 2018

case, a still-life image of flowers in a cut glass jug has its tranquil domesticity sliced into a smear of blurred colour, a momentary glitch in perception.

Touch can be interpreted as the action of the artist’s hand within a contained structure such as architecture or music. Yvonne Haber’s coloured etchings depict dynamic figural poses set within the confined apertures of a classical barrel vault. Similarly, in Kaye Mahoney’s work melodic athleticism appears as dots, puddles and bleeds of bright watercolour around stave lines, a depiction of Satie’s Gymnopèdies, further contained in a box. In these, the accommodation of architecture and the sensation of music are containers for the expressiveness of the hand.

For an artist, touch is obviously a fundamental part of the way they work, and a part of the artist is always left behind in their work in a kind of forensic exchange.

A painter’s touch for instance is often seen or sought out, often readily visible on the canvas, and whether this is achieved by vigorous, stylistic brushwork or by a painstaking absence of mark, that interaction is there and ultimately, is as readable as a signature. Traces of the artist’s hand narrate unique manual processes of making and can betray identity. Not long ago, a painting conservator was working to restore an old and damaged panel painting, thought to be a late Renaissance copy. Her hand entered the painting, touching and moving around the miniscule spaces where the painting had suffered loss and damage. There, among the archaeological layers of paint losses, repairs and cracks she came across the hand of the original painter in some pentimenti, compositional changes and corrections, indications that the painting was not a copy, but an original work by the earlier artist touching, scumbling, dabbing, painting and building their way through the picture.

Modestini describes the moment when, while working on a damaged upper lip of the portrait for which she had been referring to the Mona Lisa “I suddenly realized that the two paintings were by the same hand.”(The Leonardo Effect)1. Their touch had overlapped - across time, reputation and a painting.

Lisa Sharp July 2019

Diane Modestini, “The Leonardo Effect’ in The Brooklyn Rail, Jul-Aug 2019 https://brooklynrail.org/2019/07/criticspage/The-Leonardo-Effect 1

Jane Gerrish Holding his pencil and ready to work, this image in the rich fuchsia tones of shocking pick portrays the dynamic energy present in Henri Matisse’s elderly hand and speaks to a lifetime of touch, spent honing his skills and mastering his craft.

Touch of Creative Genius: The drawing hand of Henri Matisse Coloured pencil, 33x41cm, 2019

Yvonne Haber The learned man studying books is focused on ‘learning’ rather than living while the intimacy, closeness and touch of nature inspire these women.

Images of Inspiration - coloured etching, 57x90cm, 1992

Joy Ivill

After Basquiat combines lists, graffiti-derived heads, narration and daily social media drama in a heady mix of craft and memory as social history

After Basquiat - Needlework, 35x48cm, 2019

Kaye Mahoney Gymnopedie is the signifier and remains of a visual painted performance of Satie’s Gymnopedie, each note painted with dabs on wet ground. Where several notes make up a chord, the colours “touched” each other like a chord’s harmonised wavelengths.

Gymnopèdie - watercolour on paper in hinged wooden box, 36x56cm (4cm deep)

Janet Mitsuji Ear. Nipple. Navel. Lip. Pit. Crown. Buttock. Toe. Eyelid.

Back. Finger. Nape. The series of delicate paintings offers an intimate view of the male anatomy, framing a familiar form in a foreign way.

Portals ,12 pieces - Water colour and pencil on Arches cotton 300gsm, 21x14.8cm, 2019

Jo Nolan In the darkness, the eyes of the skin are our ancient lovers.

Scintilla - Acrylic and pumice on linen, 51x51cm

Gary Poulton The notion of ‘touch’ by consciousness against the fabric on which existence is projected is partially explored in this image.

Like a camera / Red Dot - Digital, 45x45cm, 2019

Susie Leahy Raleigh This painting is informed by researching phenomenological consciousness, hallucinogenic associations and concepts of flow and fluidity.

VIVID - Ink on Acrylic Sheet, 115x115cm

Nicole Sacks Digital manipulation adds an unpredictable, abstract element, which I find endlessly exciting

Into the Real - Oil on canvas, 84x94cm, 2019

Douglas Schofield These abstract mark focused paintings conjure an atmosphere of gardens where the rambling habit of plants and the awkward clunking of human intervention are at play.

Lost coffee mug (It’s in the garden somewhere) - Watercolour monotype on BFK Rives paper, 22x17.5 cm, 2019

Lisa Sharp When elements are replaced, circumvented or inverted, then we question what it is to have support, wear a surface and push around a body of paint.

Tea and Cinnabar - Pigment in acrylic on teabags and canvas, 30x30cm, 2019

Ann Snell The ‘Herstory’ series investigates and endorses how portraiture-based painting and sculpture is a powerful means to form relationships and promote more ‘welcome lines’ across culture and religious faith between family members and generations.

Visceral Red, Series: Herstory - Oil on Canvas, 120x200cm

Julian Wolkenstein Touch Liminal is there but not there, and only accessible through where technology imposes its visual payload upon those willing.

Touch Liminal - Augmented reality weblink, dimensions variable, location variable, 2019

Many thanks to The Artists Susannah Smith Megan Seres Lisa Sharp Geoffrey Gifford Darkstar Digital

contact: jacfontart@gmail.com