Hester
Zora
In contemplating vastness, one is confronted with the insubstantiality of one's own being. By searching for the self within this vastness what is sometimes discovered, is an immensity within.
While on a residency at Lake St Clair during the winter of 2010, I began a series of works exploring this terrain. In responding to the boundaries of enormous spaces (shoreline and horizon, darkness and dawn, sound and silence), I encountered physiological and psychological thresholds of the self: namely, the limits of my senses - seeing and hearing, and my own fear. It is the tension between these elements and the reverence of nature's immensity that informs my work.
If there exists a border-line between such mental and physical terrain, it wavers and trembles: it is soft, with vague shapes and edges both devolving toward and evolving from nothingness; it reveals itself through ambiguity and contradiction.
Extract from the Catalogue essay by Seán Kelly for the exhibition: Inland- Rendering supernatural anxiety, LARQ (Landscape Art Research Queenstown),Queenstown, Tasmania
INLAND : Memories of Space
“Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech.” (Susan Sontag)
Sara Maher’s art is such a distinctly visual phenomenon that it in many ways resists explication since it exists most intensely and most completely as pure phenomena. That is true of all art of course but a great deal of contemporary visual art could quite easily exist as a transferable concept in another medium, losing little in translation. Much current work is also less reliant on the elements that are unique to visual art and as such, derives its form and its aesthetic from the components of its assemblage and/or the ‘character’ of the concept or theory being presented in or through the work. I feel quite confident that a good description or at least a photograph of it can quite adequately convey the nature of the experience of much contemporary art, without losing much in translation. This simply does not apply to Sara Maher’s extraordinary works...
It is vital to experience Mahers work itself, no words or other forms of description or recording can come close to conveying the nature of this work adequately. Much of Maher’s work appears to have come into existence through some other agency than the human hand; it has the appearance of simply having formed through some natural organic process. The maniera in this case is not present - there is none. The characteristic mark of the artist is absent, it is as if somehow the artist’s ego has been sidestepped or subverted, as if the act of the artist is merely to create a means and an opportunity for materials to operate in ways which are unique and characteristic of them alone - the way ink coalesces, the way paper accepts staining, the way material eloquence can be coaxed out if led with a gentle and sensitive hand. Somehow this work is about sublimation of self on one level but curiously about deep penetration of self on another.
This work does not have a sub-text, it is entirely what it is, but it does have equivalence. It arises from experience and that experience arises from particular phenomena encountered by the artist. There are many examples of this but the artist provides some useful guidance in the following:
“In a sense, although my works are abstract they also mirror what was seen (eg; the image Whiteout recalls both a view seen through the ferry window when there was a whiteout and a view into the mind’s eye while experiencing a whiteout. It is about the fullness/density of silence. Another example, the image Gap in the Forest is a recollection of light coming through the trees. The outer blurry edge is both forest interior and the periphery of the mind. It is about movement in stillness and sound in silence....for example, light shimmering through leaves and wind rustling through trees.” 2
Maher’s process seeks equivalence with felt sensed-based experience and the states of mind which are instigated or engendered by those sensory experiences. Works done during her residency at Maria Island evoke stone, walls, darkness and quiet. This is the state of things as they impress themselves into consciousness in that place. The marks accrete like water wearing away surfaces and staining stone. The work grows at a steady rate through the subtle accumulation of actions of medium on/into medium. In a sense, the work grows much as the surface character of the wall grew, naturally, unbidden, unforced and unhindered by any human sense of ‘design’.
Even when the artist’s decisive slicing of a paper layer occurs it is not unrelated to the natural holes and fissures which have appeared in the paper as a result of the working of the surface, the wearing out and rubbing through from repeated gestures and movements...
Within Maher’s work there are no illusions and no allusions. Nothing represents anything; nothing stands metaphorically in place of anything else. We have an encounter with a surface and a ‘limitless’ expanse, limitless in that the border of the work often merely acts as the point where the activity is no longer visible. As in certain Abstract Expressionist works the edge implies no more than a section sliced from a greater (limitless) whole. Even where the work changes from centre to edge it only pushes the eye back into a limitless centre, a void at the heart of the work.
2. From Artist’s Statements
All enquiries welcome: Tel: (03) 9417 2828 Email: enquiries@catherineasquithgallery.com.
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Hester |
Zora |