This is an exhibition of the tactile
— you’ll want to touch, but you can’t, and that tension will generate insight upon
insight in a cascading run of sensations. For these works are about sensations,
as much as they are about displacement, disconnection, but also invitation and
entry points.
There are three series of work here;
each of the threads is in conversation, in this superb open space where light
and bareness coalesce. The natural elements are displaced, as the Murray Cod
you will see drawn on ancient petrified redgum sanded and polished to a sheen,
and the orchids you see in their aching leaves and stalks and blossoms are a
long way from home. Yet such separations create empathy, for the fish is trying
not only to find its way home, to understand its own issues of belonging, but
also to tell us something about our own conditions of belonging and isolation.
In a sense, the threads interweaving in this distant space are about empathy
and hope.
And as a silhouette of the ‘Fish Out of Water — Murray Cod’ series there is an earlier work, and some understanding
of the drives of this work is useful in approaching ‘Murray Cod.’ Filomena
Coppola has said:
Fish out of
Water – Murray Cod is a development from an intervention project that began
at summer solstice, 2013 and continued through summer solstice 2014. I have
been painting a lone sardine on a river pebble – the sardine is a reference to
the waters near Sardegna and the Port of Napoli – the port where my parents
began their journey to Australia. I then released a pebble at each of the eight
sabbats. These represent the earth changes of the summer and winter solstice,
the equinoxes and the four cross quarters of Lammas, Samhain, Imbolc and
Beltane. Often associated with pagan festivals, I am acknowledging this history
as well as connecting with the earth changes throughout the year; the seasons,
light and my own connection to place.
If you’re
interested in the dynamics of this fascinating project, there’s a downloadable
pdf available via Filomena’s website. And though these sardines are in evidence
in the framed works here (which constitute one of the three main narratives in
the exhibition), crossing Australia on their long, almost timeless journey,
carrying stories across the world’s oceans and acting as shamans and healers on
behalf of the earth itself, while also functioning as cultural intermediary and
creating a hybrid presence and new stories as they progress, the real focus of
the ‘Fish Out of Water’ installations here is the ‘Murray Cod’ of which the
artist notes:
This work Fish
out of Water – Murray Cod is a continuation of this project. Working with
petrified red gum, which is between 5000-9000 years old and sourced from the
Murray River, I made nine organic forms – grinding and sanding the wood into
forms that are beautiful to hold. The petrified red gum carries within it
stories of the Murray River, this continent, its cultural history, and the
floods, droughts, fires that have affected this landscape. I feel that each
organic form vibrates with the history that it carries. On each, I have painted
a Murray Cod – a fish out of water – a comment on this changing continent, its
climate, culture and demographic. I then travelled the length of the Murray
River and selected nine locations beginning at Cudgewa Creek and ending where
the river runs to the ocean at Goolwa’
[Artist’s
statement — website].
And we can see that journey here,
and we can connect with its cyclical movement, and share the journeys. This
vital predatory fish of the Murray-Darling system — one that nurtures and
protects its eggs — is under threat in its own home. It is looking for a way
back to its stories, its narrative of being. And, in addition to this, we can all
question our own understandings of cultural presence and relativism, and the
responsibility we all have to respect the different stories of belonging, and
the different stories of journeying. I appreciate and admire the respect shown
to Indigenous knowledge and presence, and the power of that belonging.
The other thread of this exhibition,
the ‘Wallflower’ series, is in part about sexuality and female subjectivity,
and this doesn’t necessarily mean it requires the male, though the male may be
there, hovering around the edges. It’s about identity more than sexuality, and
as sensual it is, it’s for the ‘female’ to decide, to make choices.
In many ways, these flowers are
speaking to women, though not exclusively — these are not to be left sitting on
the sidelines neglected, waiting to be asked to dance, they are far too active
in their apparent quietude for that. These are suggestions of female bodies — but
there’s the furred implication of male presence as well, but maybe that’s not
essential here. What’s challenging in all this is that these ‘parts’ are closer
than many would like to think — they fur together, they grow together, they are
part of the living organism, of the essence of life itself.
There’s nothing prurient in this —
it’s threatening, sure, but life is about risk and we need to understand our
discomforts as much as our pleasures. So, enticing and disturbing, maybe, at
once?
They are also outside sexuality, as they
are outside the plant, the botanical. They are vegetable becoming animal and
vice versa; they are the interweaving of all life into the moment of
observation and experience. And the desire to touch. First thing I did when
approaching the remarkable ‘Wallflower — Meow, make me purr’, was reach out to
touch, then remind myself, No, that’s not permitted, not part of the rules of
encounter. Step back, respect the intactness of the image before you, and all
it represents.
Not only did I want to stroke the
fur as one might a partner’s hair, or an animal’s fur, but to stroke it against
the grain, the wrong way. Because there’s something disturbing going on in
these drawings, something that makes the pastels hyper-real beyond
illustration, and something almost carnivorous. Not as dentata, or as
invasiveness, but as a dangerous kind of welcome.
Talking with Filomena, she mentioned
the animal belly seam in the fur, and I agreed, I had encountered that in the
work as well — something liminal, a line that is vulnerable and yet assertive.
The irony of the docile image of the wallpaper background, the polite and muted
domestic, is that within the walls of rooms the secrets are held, the risks
taken in love and life, and shared encounters made. There is something
threatening and rebellious in all this; with its undertones of the anarchist
designer William Morris, one is also reminded of where the decorative meets
craft.
And also something investigative, as
we find with the sardine swimming through the neat, small frames of botany,
zoology, and rainfall data on the Australian map in the three confrontations
with data and subjectivity — what facts we have, what we know, and yet the
‘touch’, the qualities of life itself are often missed. As the sardine ‘swims’
on the dry dead eucalypt leaves in these montages, it lifts details into the
sensorium, into the realm of environmental investigation, consequence, and we
hope, healing.
But we are ahead of ourselves here,
because we need to find the Murray Cod trying to re-enter the river, a river
that has suffered horrendously from environmental degradation, that is a
barometer for the consequences of colonialism. Yet it’s also a river of ongoing
beauty and strength, and that’s to be embraced; the presence of people has been
part of its being for tens of thousands of years, and the new migrants to
Australia of the last two hundred or so years, or, indeed, of the last decades,
can be part of its repair and its spirit if they listen, learn and sense.
I see the ‘Fish Out of Water’ Series
as very much about healing, about return, about belonging. The merging of
textures in the ‘pebbles’ — the wooden stones, if you like — carrying the fish
as they ‘bed down’ in different locations on or near the river, or by the sea
shore, absorb the qualities of those locations, and return to their homes with
the knowledge of their experiences. This is an ongoing conversation, in which
learning is essential — Filomena Coppola has gifted us a role in this
narrative, and that is to find the fish, to witness, to return them to their
homes, and in doing so share in this illumination.
For me, touch — the tactile — is a
vital component of understanding. I was lucky enough to have the artist hand me
one of the stones — the Barmah stone — to hold, to nurture in my palm. It’s a
disconcerting and reassuring experience at once — a sense of breaking a taboo,
of being where you shouldn’t, and yet entirely ‘natural’. Now, viewers can’t
touch these objects, but they will want to, and that’s the point. On their
wooden platforms with photos of sites where the fish out of water will try to
find its way back, they tempt us to pick them up and put them in place. I asked
a couple of people which fish they connected with, and three said the image of
the reeds, as the fish was soon going to work its way through the reeds back
into water. Another said, ‘All of them’ — a collective experience of return and
belonging.
In all of this, the hybrid, the
identity made up of many experiences and backgrounds and even origins, is part
of the understanding, part of the beauty and the trauma. No easy solutions are
offered in this, and neither, I think, can art do that. Art is about ambiguity
as much as resolution.
Mentally, away from the space of the
exhibition, my mind keeps returning the installation of/from/out of Bonegilla,
and its relatively recent history as a migrant camp of many Nissen huts, and
the transitions from one life into another. All lives are part of presence, and
the fish returning to water is a complex journey, and involves many stories;
these are fixed and unfixed, and have a massive breadth.
So, respect and welcome and
difficulty and reconciliation and hope and desire and questioning and
conservation and learning. And touch. Filomena Coppola said to me as we were
looking at the image of the fish on its ‘pebble’ near rock-pools that will
probably dry out, leaving it more stranded than ever in an alienating
landscape, but we hope, we hope against the odds, that she intends, ‘Layers of
different cultures in landscapes...’, and this is surely the case.
So, I declare this beautifully
uncomfortable exhibition open — it is seductive and disturbing in so many
different ways, and it is generative, and searches for a healing and a healthy
future. And may you embrace its talismanic seeing-stones — touching them with
your mind’s eye, but not your fingers!
John Kinsella
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