Abstract:
This research engages in imaginative attunements with the nuances of nature, such as shifting colour, light, atmosphere, textural details and growth patterns. This grew out of an investigation which initially had a basis in looking at current trends in our relationship to nature, balancing the earth’s natural/built-up processes and thinking about what ‘progress’ means today, as pivotal to our relationship with the natural world. Further down the track, the question of what it means to be permeable to our surrounds began to lead the enquiry, and the research synthesises aspects of work by painters including Édouard Vuillard, François Rouan, Tauba Auerbach and writer Barbara Hurd.
It begins by analysing the paintings of Édouard Vuillard through a lens of what I am calling ‘prismatic assemblages’. Vuillard’s compositions emerging around 1891, intimately sensed his subjects like nature - as dynamic and integrated. Hierarchies of visual language compete with
each other 'prismatically', orchestrated by the flattening of the picture plane, use of densely textured patterns and vibrant scenes of tessellating light. Leading on from this is an exploration of unique moments of illusion and dimensionality within his work. Following this, is a study into François Rouan’s 'tressages', involving the weaving of
painted canvas and paper whereby he employs a unique method of merging pictorial space, to produce the hypnotic effect of floating, 'flickering-fields'. This chapter looks into his development of figure and ground integration, through his early ink studies Etude d’après Lorenzetti (1975) and Figures/Paysages (1974). Following these pivotal works, a kind of palpitating, living surface begins to emerge within his mode of 'tressage'. The essay then examines contemporary painter Tauba Auerbach’s Fold series produced in 2011. Her gestural memory-process of folding/unfolding canvas and spraying colour from the
periphery results in an array of dimensional-atmospheres, reminiscent of delicate unfolded silk or vast landscapes. Auerbach’s work plays with our awareness of 'process' as she centres our viewership in the space between two and three dimensions, causing the viewer to adjust and
work through her play with illusion. Here she summons, or at least imagines, the space between dimensions – suggesting a more fluid model of spatial reason. Finally, the essay explores Barbara Hurd’s series of short essays Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination (2008), which seeks to re-position such 'mucky' sites as
richly imaginative and sensual, teeming with life and complex processes. This section looks closely at the experience of re-attuning the body with nature while exploring contemporary ideas for re-thinking value systems, affecting our relationship with the earth and potential for further synchronicity.