Mat Collishaw
Last week Noel suggested looking at the works of Mat Collishaw, and the parallels between his Infectious Flowers (2005) series and the bouquet scans I've been making. Collishaw is a multidisciplinary British artist who is known for his sculptural works, photography, digital art and installation. Infectious Flowers is a series of several colour c-type photographic images featuring what appear to be flowers, which on closer inspection are revealed to be digital collages of diseased human skin. From the website's description:
In Nature H'Abour, JK Huysman describes a wealthy collector and recluse who became obsessed with rare species of flowers. His pathology is emphatically illustrated when he starts to collect flowers that appear to be infected with tropical diseases. Collishaw took images of various skin infections and inflammation from dermatological book and grafted them onto photographs of flowers using a computer. The pictures also recalled the writings of Jean Genet’s journals in prison when he describes his cellmate’s wounds and pustules as embellishments. Like flowers or medals adorning a male jacket, the lines between beauty and repulsion become blurred.
There are some interesting parallels between what I've been exploring in regard to assemblage in my work and Collishaw's use of digital collage. Perhaps a difference is the amount of construction that's gone into our works respectively - Collishaw has a specific form in mind in these works by the look of them, while I'm trying to steer away from anything too literal or that leads the audience to seeing things as a certain form. I appreciate that these images do ask the question of what is natural - there's a sort of levelling effect that they have when thinking about what they are comprised of; a skin disease is I suppose as natural as a flower, both grow and morph, and there is some strange beauty in the forms if you don't think too much about the implications of them... They make me think back on the works I have been writing on for our literature review, particularly Timothy Morton's statement that "there is no human DNA" - everything is comprised of other things. Against the stormy atmospheric background, they are both horrifying and beautiful.
Bobbie Gray Gray is an artist whose work I've been following for some time now. Bobbie Gray is an Auckland-based artist whose work includes sculpture, moving image, painting, installation, curation and project development. Her practice explores the connection between people and the natural environment, the Anthropocene and "is intended to offer insight into the ability of art to reframe our relationship with the environment, and our everyday experiences".* Earlier in the year I was looking at her works posted regularly on Instagram - specifically her paintings. These works recently were featured in her Insignificant Other exhibition at Depot Artspace:
Insignificant Other brings everyday life into art through magnifying borer ‘galleries’ found in the native timber floors of the artist’s home. Selected sections of chewed-out floorboards are magnified and presented as individual compositions, generating a language all of their own. They could be mistaken for words or symbols, of some foreign or ancient language - the hieroglyphs of New Zealand’s heritage homes and buildings. Each work is meticulously finished with a precise colour palette, creating an aesthetic of contemporary design while portraying a feature common only to places of the past.
Poised between sculpture and painting, these hand-routed, human-scale engravings are traces of the vast, yet complex realities that lie beneath the surface of our own existence. The works read as abstract paintings, yet the mark making delves beneath the surface, revealing physical depth. The lines left are evidence of life lived, in parallel with our own.
Exploring perspective of self, Insignificant Other plays on the concept of sonder: the realisation that each random passer-by is living a life as complex as your own. Through this new lens we are able to see ourselves as merely a tiny part of something infinitely bigger, allowing our day to day troubles to fade away.
These works inspired my early film experiment that involved tracking the movement of particles in the water at Orakei Basin. I found Gray's exploration of the unseen lives of the borer curious and endearing, and her translation of their markings into a visual language on a human scale brought attention to their existence and impact on the artist's home. I think in lockdown we probably all became a bit more hyper-aware of our surroundings and who or what we were sharing them with; I think this is still impacting my practice today.
Another of Gray's works, Digital Garden (2017) - a three-video projection of a 12 minute looped film -, has been a point of inspiration around how both film and projection could be used as exhibition options and in the treatment of isolated natural objects.
Using an integration of technology and environmental elements, this work explores the tension between the natural environment and mediated reality, along with an ongoing investigation surrounding the nature of perception. Moving image is used as a tool to explore how context and framing shape the meaning and experience of an artwork. Scavenged organic materials are utilised together with shifts in scale and lighting to create believable yet entirely artificial environments. By filming these scenarios in real time, the intention is to give the work a moment of ambiguity, that deals with the idea of image culture, and the replacing of direct experience with simulacra.
By utilising living nature, such as grass, Digital Garden aims to create a new botanical universe, a place between dreams and reality. By placing viewers in the heart of a reinvented nature, the work attempts to create a symbiosis between art, nature and us. The movement of each element in and out of the overall sequence suggests that what we see is only part of the work, the rest must be mentally reconstructed and in this way we project our vision beyond the “frame” of the artwork. In opposition to the unrelenting pace of digital existence, this new botanical universe unfolds in a slow mesmerising fashion, intended to create an environment of meditative contemplation.
Watching this film, I had a similar experience as I did with the night-time filming I tried experimenting with last week - as objects came into view and clarity out of the darkness, the position of objects in the frame and the camera's movement made me feel as if I was watching a deep-sea exploration video. In thinking about ecology and the amount that we know about the world, there are still so many unknowns and mysteries under our noses. I don't think we'll ever be able to explore them all, or if we do we'll be limited to our own understanding of them and the languages we have at hand (something Morton explores in his work "Thinking ecology" that I wrote on this week). Works like this remind me of the curiosity we can experience with what is already familiar or within our reach, and how a change in perspective or encounter can bring about a new relationship and engagement with these things (strange strangers perhaps)... The work also brings up a similar question of 'what is natural?', especially with how curated the video is and how consciously placed each isolated plant object is in the film. The "believable yet artificial" is a quality I've been thinking on a lot in relation to my own practice - it is not that I want my works to embody this quality, I think, but I would like them to continue to occupy that space of flux in which those qualities are questioned...
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