By Lucy Wilson
Walking
to the Opening of The Unconformity
Project at LARQ (Landscape Art Research Queenstown) run by Raymond Arnold, I caught sight of Mount Mother Lyell in the late afternoon
light. Spectacular. The sun was illuminating the bare rocky surface, which
glowed through its weather washed patina. I soon learnt in the exhibition
speeches about ‘the Western Feeling’.
It
was in The Unconformity Project that
geology and art came together. Where the movement of human endeavour above and
below the surface of the earth encountered the natural and mysterious movement
of rocks below. Vivid connections were made by artists Tim Chatwin, Julian
Cooper, Ruth Johnstone and Jan Senbergs in a four part exhibition.
The
art of gathering – in this instance gathering rocks, artists, place and time
together – is another art form for Raymond Arnold. The project in some way
emulated the phenomenon of geological Unconformity by presenting a rare artistical feature, showing artists' work
from different eras and different perspectives and in varying forms, yet all
drawn together by the unlayering of rock in Tasmania. Cuts of history and rock
intrigue taught us about the deeper layers of Queenstown and our own
relationship with the underground.
Julian
Cooper painted Philosopher’s Ridge and features found in walls of rock like
sliding pillars and ‘benches’. He lives in England and comes from a lineage of
British landscape painters. Raymond Arnold has been following his work for over
twenty years and invited him to be LARQ’s 2011 Artist in Residence to spend
time painting the mines and mountains around Queenstown. He accepted and it
seems the gathering of these two artists has chemistry as exciting as the union
of unconformity rock. They share, in Julian’s words to Raymond, “the ambition of
extending the idea of `landscape’, to encompass human interventions and
extractions … acknowledging that we as humans are inextricably part of
`nature’, and more and more a governing factor on the behaviour of its
processes in terms of climate, geology, and life forms.”
Raymond
describes Julian’s paintings as “direct and intimate”. Julian has painted all
his life with a focus on landscape and rocky mountains, including a pilgrimage
to Tibet’s sacred Mount Kailash. Yet he had never before used the colours or
range of palette he found in Western Tasmania. Recently he’s been exploring a
contemporary language for painting mountain and rock, and in his Queenstown
work he found it. He uses long brushes so he paints with his whole body and has
such a high level of skill and freedom that he creates fearlessly contemporary and spirited works. They’re deeply honest paintings. He paints the
rock as it is, but in a way that I haven’t seen before; this has influenced the
way I now look at the rock and opened my eyes and appreciation in a new way. As
we drove out of Queenstown, past the cut in the rock for the road, I could
`see’ Julian’s paintings.
Tim
Chatwin’s paintings of the Beaconsfield mine instantly stirred my memory of its
relatively recent disaster, which flashed all over the world with the speed,
breadth and width of global media. It was before iPhone technology, which has
catapulted us ever further into instant touch screen communication, but was a
far cry from the scramble for telegrams that jammed the wires and broadsheets
of a hundred years ago during the Mount Lyell mine disaster. Both disasters had
panic, fear, jubilation for the survivors and grief for the dead. I confess
that in the limited time to do everything in the festival the gallery doors to
Tim’s exhibition were unfortunately closed when I got there so I pressed my
face against the window to look at images of fluorescent mining clothes hanging
on hooks and other underground scenes. In his exhibition notes Tim writes about
the vertigo of experiencing ‘deep’ time by going underground on a spiralling
descent through mining cuts, with rocks over 400million years old.
There
were two exhibits at the Mt Lyell General Manager’s Office, which attracted
lots of people wanting a sticky-beak at an otherwise closed-door environment.
Melbourne artist Dr Ruth Johnstone has been an artist in residence with LARQ
and focused on Robert Sticht who was the Manager of the mine at the time of the
disaster. In his office her installation Mining
the Archive showed his avid passion for collecting prints, including
valuable Durer woodcuts and Rembrandts now held in the National Gallery of
Victoria. With extensive research Ruth had created a literal rendition of
Sticht’s opulent manager’s house figuratively at the top of the mine with a
noisy mechanism carrying messages and ore up and down. I would have liked to
linger over the hundreds of copied prints, but the whirring of the mechanism
grated on my tired nerves, so I moved on.
Painter
Jan Senbergs spent time in Queenstown in the early 1980’s when the Franklin Dam
controversy was in full swing. (Interestingly it was due to the innovations of
the Mount Lyell Mining Company that the Hydro Electric Commission was
established in Western Tasmania with the Lake Margaret power scheme, which
still exists today.) It was important to see earlier artistic responses and
depictions of the mine and Queenstown landscape. His drawing/note book was open
and a few impressive large canvases painted with a dark palette had temporarily
returned to their source for the festival, including The crib room where miners have a break and rest, depicted as a
symmetrical scene with candles and underground shafts and activity.
The crowd at the LARQ Combined Exhibition Opening spilled out onto the street,
encompassing the ever-changing light and colour of the surrounding hills.
