Art Beat, Melbourne
three artists confront nature
Kim Anderson (Flinders Lane Gallery, 1st Fl, Nicholas Bldg, Cnr Flinders Lane & Swanston St, Melb., until Nov. 29; www.flg.com.au )
Carolyn Roberts (forty-five downstairs, 45 Flinders Ln, Melb., until Nov. 22; www.fortyfivedownstairs.com.au )
Janet Laurence (Arc One Gallery, 45 Flinders Ln, Melb., until Jan. 31, 2026; www.arcone.com.au )
Castlemaine Experimental Print Prize (Castlemaine Art Museum, 14 Lyttleton St, Castlemaine, until Mar. 1, 2026; www.castlemaineartmuseum.com.au )
Working as an art critic there are moments when one feels it’s a privilege moving within the art scene. Nothing equates with meeting the artists I’ve encountered, and I cherish the acquaintances—and friendships—I’ve made. But what especially stands out are those times, and there are more than a few, when I’ve come away from an exhibition knowing I’ve just seen something very special. This past week, in a show of bushland drawings, I had that experience again.
Kim Anderson’s subject is a pocket of bush between Ballarat and Hepburn Springs. Aspiring to voice her disquiet about the prospects for the environment generally, and working on paper with a mix of charcoal, graphite, subtle touches of ink, then finishing with cold wax, this artist has produced nine renderings of lithe saplings basking in sunlight. They are highly disciplined works; but how Anderson conveys genius loci, a sense of place, sets the viewer overlooking craftsmanship and fixing on those trees waving in a breeze. The uninformed might call these qualities ‘photographic’, but by a strange creative alchemy they are more, embodying sensations no mechanical device can perceive.
Eight of the drawings in Anderson’s exhibition present aspects of wild bush as directly registered by the eye, a sort of ‘unfiltered’ record of visual encounter. There is what you see if you look straight up, trying to make out clear sky through the massed slender gum leaves reaching over you directly above. There is what you see as you stand in this light bush and stare straight ahead, the screening affect of foliage and twisting branches. There is what you see if you look directly at the pale trunk of a eucalypt, at its surface, those constant shadow patterns cast by interlacing leaves, twigs and boughs. With drawings for each of these, the gathered works circumscribe how, in visual terms, we apprehend bushland when standing within it. Video ergo sum they seemingly assert.
The focus of the exhibition, physically and creatively, is All the Beauty and the Terror, an immense drawn picture (it measures 103 x 210cm) of breathtaking beauty and compositional complexity. Fixing upon an acre of regrowth bushland on the Victorian goldfields, Anderson has shaped a transcendent vision of sunlight falling through young saplings on a foggy morn. (Illus. above) There’s a twist here, for the thickened air might be well due to smoke from an advancing bushfire, not cool mists. So much is handled in what is a Constable-quality intimist drawing of forest: leafy silhouette, screening scrub, twisting trunks, shadows cast through the misty air, and a rising sun which sets up orthogonals of illumination and shade lancing through the composition.
Readers will recognise this work’s title, which is borrowed from Dorothea Mackellar’s famous poem ‘My Country’, that testament to her love of Australia, a homeland she always claimed shaped her very spirit. I don’t think that title is so much intended as an homage, as indicating a position. Because as in poetry, so, too, in Anderson’s reverential picture. She loves a sunburnt county…
Hierarchy of media is nowadays so dominant that certain materials rarely have a look in. Watercolour, especially, gets short shrift on the contemporary circuit; indeed, mere mention of the word is enough to set curator’s eyes rolling in snobbish disbelief. If your values are in such manner inclined, then take this as a trigger alert.
In the smaller front gallery at Forty-Five Downstairs gallery Carolyn Roberts is exhibiting 22 tenderly crafted watercolours, and a hand-made artist’s book. All are filled with a colourful visual potpourri of flowers, plump buds, diverse leaves, berries on vines, most also including studies of perching birds and several handsome butterflies. The uninitiated might misconstrue the paintings as extensions of botanical and ornithological illustration, but Roberts is most emphatically an artist intent on using flora and fauna to compose and communicate. There are no blunt scientific-style images in what is a delight filled show.
That said, Roberts attempts several different things, certain pieces appearing one-off experiments. The two attempts at story-telling, if charming in illustrative terms, don’t quite mesh with the rest. While the collaged fragments of music and verse strike me as unnecessary, especially the written quotations from major French novels and poems. In visual terms they sit awkwardly in a dozen compositions; they also probably need translations (and explanations) for Australian viewers.
The exhibition’s undoubted strengths lie in three large compositions (#8, #10, #11) which suggest scattered leaves fallen flat upon a clean sheet of paper. Capably designed, they are very tasty pictures which radiate autumnal colour.
Even better is a series of small square works, collectively titled Window to a Garden. All use concise depictions of flowers and leaves to frame either a bird or a butterfly. (see below) The subject matter in most is probably native to the countryside of northern France where the artist has set up studio. As it was my eye was drawn to #14 Window to a Garden—Magpie, the familiar Australian bird being encircled by a interweaving foliage from eucalypt and grevillea, and also #17 Window to a Garden—Orchard Swallowtail where the indigenous butterfly is enclosed by leafy branches of hakea and callistemon.
Janet Laurence’s exhibit Ice Remembers Snow stands apart in the summer group show at Arc One. Having watched her evolve creatively since I began reviewing, I am admittedly a long-term fan of this artist’s environmentally-committed work.
Laurence is chiefly a maker of symbols. For some years now she has assembled works using large sheets of transparent and over-printed polyester. These are slotted into metal brackets and held before a sheer white wall, enabling the viewer to look through layers of what are immense coloured slides. The effect is to suggest a layering of time within a region, and its associated environmental changes.
Scrutinising Ice Remembers Snow, a prevailingly marine blue work from Laurence’s new series Once Were Forests, a mucus-like white fluid has been poured down the top sheet. Sprayed droplets of water which have frozen to ice, and ovoid scoops of snow appear among the layered images to the left. While infertile and desolate rocky terrain viewed from an satellite is glimpsed in the layered imagery at the right. With this work Laurence seeks to persuade by presenting potent visual metaphors for the steady incremental damage being done to our fragile planet.
Not so much a review, as a mention for the Castlemaine Experimental Print Prize. Looking like a big curated show—it fills the entire back gallery, and an adjacent display room—there are way too many pieces to cover. I’d like to say something about at least three quarters of the artists, which testifies to the overall quality of work selected. And don’t let that term ‘Experimental’ allow you to pre-judge because this is a normal print prize, with only a couple of pieces technically stretching the envelope.
I’d recommend that visitors initially go through and look at the entire hang, savouring each work for its visual qualities. Do not read the long labels before looking, because they are overloaded (overburdened?) with agendas which can be such a distraction. Once you have had a firm look, then read that label, and assorted works will change considerably in your estimation.
Rebecca Murray’s entry needs no verbal justification. Based on tiny leaf litter scattered upon the ground, the intricate decisions made by her sensitive eye are so evident, so aesthetically sufficient, that mere words diminish the complex visual qualities of her work. In contrast, Chris Orr’s anxious complaint ‘AI cannibalises our art’ seems to complete—and enhance—his immense labyrinthine image of automaton-like faces absorbed into motherboard components. Those words about AI not only serve to focus the viewer’s attention. They articulate feelings I have much heard of late (Orr’s disturbing slogan ought to be printed on signs and carried about by young creators at the next Art Fair). Meanwhile Damon Kowarsky’s entry brings up that old dilemma about art which trades in the ‘unsayable’. You look at his multi-plate aquatint of a wilderness landscape, which seems a straightforward view, then read this is where Kowarsky spent his honeymoon—the etching is from a drawing made that joy-filled week. The modernist sculptor Gaston Lachaise had a special category for such work: ‘This was made with love,’ he’d declare, insisting no other information was required to engage with it meaningfully.
