Sawtooth Ari Writing Prize...

A number of writers submitted reviews, poetry and prose as part of Sawtooth's inaugural writing prize.

It was fantastic to be one of the three judges. Read all about it at the Sawtooth Ari site.

A Body Residing - Wendy Morrow

This review was published with the kind permission of Sawtooth Ari, Launceston, Tasmania.

Intimacy.

I hear the word and think of closeness. I think of exclusiveness and privilege, of trust and of understanding. I think of a moment when one body is released from self-consciousness and surrendered to a moment of mind and heart to be given to another. The unseen energies of emotional complexity overwhelm the fickleness of physicality in favour of desire. Nothing matters in this space but mutual alignment. Intimacy is meant to extend beyond our self - it involves an other. Intimacy is harmony, and can be as temporal as a song.

I think of intimacy particularly as I seat myself barefooted on the floor with others who have gathered in the final hours of the first residency that Morrow will undertake this year at Sawtooth ARI. A second will follow in the winter months, but that seems as distant as consequence. Morrow has requested that we remove our shoes and let the soles of our feet touch the surface beneath us. It is strangely unifying.

Morrow prompts us to position ourselves at the fringe of the Sawtooth Front Gallery. We have been invited here as observers and potential collaborators. We are as in the present as Morrow is. What is happening is happening now void of choreography and rehearsal. With A Body Residing the artist is precariously negotiating the place between the activation of a space and being activated by it. Morrow’s residency in the empty Sawtooth gallery is an exploration into self, place and external collaboration conjoined with movement and dance. In this space, she has listened, conversed, and reacted to the undercurrent of essence that a building possesses yet is seldom exposed.

I think about destination. I think about journey.

As Morrow moves in exquisite silence, the building itself compliments her. It buckles under the heat and rattles at the intervening afternoon winds. The soundscape of the street below creeps in, as does the flight path of the skies above. All the while, Morrow is moving and exposing us to a beautiful kind-of synergy offered by the walls she is performing between. Nothing is fixed. Everything is fluid.

When the artist has exhausted her improvisational interaction with the space, she comes back to us and we are ushered backwards through a second space to take seat again for the second observation. The time Morrow introduces the space of objects, where introduced items are there for use or non-use. A directional lamp faces a corner with its core function redundant, instead becoming a listening device rather than a light. A thin strip of paper has begun to fall away from the wall. The layers, the skin, of both person and place are evident. On the floor, large sheets of tissue paper and stacked into a neat pile. Even here, the layers can be seen. Some sheets are crinkled by a previous interaction, others are untouched. Morrow moves around the space and then onto the paper. Intently she steps one foot first and then the other allowing time to absorb the sensations and sounds being produced by her movement. Eventually she lays herself down and begins a slow writhe ultimately wrapping her body with the paper in a mesmerising display of connectedness.

To complete the trilogy of spaces Morrow has worked with during her residency, she retreats beyond the wall to explore the window into Sawtooth’s heart – the office. Short but beautiful, Morrow exposes the window, a thing of practicality that offers both a view in and a view out, and if nothing else is an unsightly blot that most gloss over perhaps more out of etiquette than any other reason. The glass creates a division between public and private, for but Morrow it acts as a device that heightens the presence of reflection. We can see her, but her dance is competing with the view from above us and behind. She weaves herself seamlessly into the frame, and then all too quickly recedes.  

Afterwards, all who are present talk and discuss the happenings within the space over the last few days and of Wendy’s collaborations with artists who she worked with to investigate creative play. We are reminded that this residency is but one of two, and just like intimacy we have been tantalised enough to want to be in this position again.

Bring on the winter.

 - Patrick Sutczak (January 2014)

Sawtooth ARI Artist-in-Residence.25-27 January 2014

A Cloud in Sawtooth

A cloud can never die: Ice, water, mist


Phoebe McDonald (QLD)


Sawtooth ARI, @Sawtooth Pop-up #Exhibition

by Patrick Sutczak


I move around the walls of the @Sawtooth space. The gallery is closed. The fluorescents are off but there is ample morning light washing in from skylights above. I have come to meet someone but I am purposefully early so that I can revisit the work by Phoebe McDonald for a second time in silence.

 I pause at each photograph and peer in, perhaps trying to let the frame and the wall behind it dissolve in an attempt to transport myself into the isolation. It doesn’t work of course. I am not going anywhere. These images in the first instance (or even the second) are of familiar things - beautiful things to be sure, but familiar all the same. Distant and precious, the Arctic ice is the very epitome of global conservationist imagery. Lose that and we lose everything. From National Geographic to Instagram, the ice is never far away. It is certainly easy (forgivable even) to see the images for what they appear to be.

With A cloud can never die however, I look more closely and see something else entirely. I continue to visit each photograph and the next, and then I go back to each one again. I know that I am not simply looking at the ice, but rather the light upon the ice at play with a complex series of natural convergences. McDonald has an impressive eye, and an enviable patience. Nature rarely behaves the way we want it to, yet McDonald has recorded images that portfolio her artistic research interests.

The works on exhibition on the walls of the @Sawtooth space are not only stunning for their subject matter, but for their compositional integrity through vision and decision. Landscapes are so often passed through and never lived in, and this is why I think the artist pulls the breaks for us, places a hand upon our chin, turns our head from forward and says ‘Look’.

This is what I am seeing as I move around the walls – the unpredictability of natural forces and the fleetingness of light. Set within the frame is the moment that McDonald placed her finger on the button and captured the instant her heart beat the loudest. Amidst the inevitable change and conditional circumstances witnessed by being there, was a moment that sang to her, or so I believe. With the ever-changing ice, the turbulence of a shifting landscape, the hovering mist and the seductiveness of water, these elements seem to appeal to McDonald’s ongoing fascination with shadow, sunlight, and the subtle transformation of natural landscapes.

This review was first published on the Sawtooth Ari website www.sawtooth.org.au

Waterwalkers

by Patrick Sutczak

At the still point of the turning world, Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor toward; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement, And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point

There would be dance, and there is no dance.

T.S. Eliot, BN II: 16-21

It is important to read that beautiful piece from T.S. Eliot’s epic Four Quartets in order to appreciate the deeper emotional and ontological associations with Darryl Rogers' Waterwalkers currently exhibiting at Sawtooth ARI in Launceston.

A brief but carefully worded blurb attached to the corridor on the way into the exhibition gives us a clue that Roger’s work is rich with complex ideas featuring time, no-time, quantum theory and matter fused with Eliot’s exquisite poetry.

Doing Lines

By Patrick Sutczak
Sawtooth Gallery 27 April – 19 May

Sonja Brough

Collective rainbow segments of a serpentine whole weave their way across the wall, hanging effortlessly (how, I do not know) upon the entrance to Sawtooth’s expansive Front Gallery. This is the first introduction to the exhibition by Sonja Brough. Although not immediately apparent, these cups displayed in their eclectic arrangement of sometimes end-to-end suspension suggest a pattern in motion, but not as we know it. 
They spoon together as if hinged by an invisible spine caught in a whiplash of flight across air, land, water, or, in this case, wall.