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Opening 18.09.2021 | 18.00
21.00 Musical Performance on opening night by Black Milk and Evil Mothers
Artist’s Statement: 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.
I started by painting text from the poems, playing with the rhythm of words and allowing the patterns of letters to evolve into large 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 sank 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 think of these little watercolours as traps for light and colour, as vessels to hold the poet’s metaphors and the meanings that might be found in them. I imagine atmospheres at different times of day, 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 onto 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.
Spirograph No. I
