out in the I know nothing country
Solo exhibition of work by Patricia Wilson-Adams at Tamworth Regional Art Gallery
20 July to 31 August 2013
 |
walking on salt lakes
2 plate etching
and spit bite aquatint, 32.8 x 39.5 cm |
Patricia Wilson-Adams has been out beyond the Great Divide,
exploring “the I know nothing country”. Far
beyond her familiar surroundings, she is experiencing the still centre of her
being and its awakening in the quiet nothingness of a vast and limitless
horizon.
Conceptually her work is
related to an area now being described as Ecophenomenology or
the fundamental re-conceptualisation of human relationships with
the natural earth … necessary to help undo the damage stemming from a
contemporary western history of separation from and utilitarian valuation and
exploitation of the natural world.[i]
This may be further
interpreted as a form of "spiritual ecology", the
acknowledgement of the inner connectedness of all living things as part of the
planet's vital biofeedback system. The negation of the existence of the
"World Soul", or the anima mundi, from our collective consciousness
and lack of respect for the planet as a living conscious entity has exacerbated
this separation. A re-acknowledgement of this sentiency now provides an avenue
to restore wholeness, a return to balance, or, as Wilson-Adams refers to it, as
"the centre". For her it is the still central point of being in
relation to the self, to memory of land and those loved ones who have gone
before, to our symbiotic relationship with the land and a connection
encompassing the global.
out in the I know nothing country is an acknowledgement of country
as a vast sentient entity that cannot be fully known or understood, where one's
previous experiences and concepts are dwarfed by the effulgence and exultation
of experiencing the natural world beyond our immediate environment. She explores these dimensions through her
printmaking and sculpture, seeking a deeper level in moving from the known
centre to the circumference and back again to arrive at a new centre or point
of awareness.
For Wilson-Adams the
creative process is constantly informed through the distillation of thoughts
and mnemonic experiences. The simple sensory act of smelling a peach evokes a
deep heartfelt response to a shared memory with her late father. The bare peach
stone, the centre or kernel of the fruit/memory/still point within the soul is
projected into a series of small bronze sculptures, titled The smell of peaches always makes me cry. Much like the soul, the
seed of the peach contains the matrix or blueprint for its own creation.
Dead
trees, like dead women, don't write much poetry pays homage to the lives
of women who have transcended the circumference of experience and have returned
to the stillness of the centre. The concentric rings within the tree trunks
signify cycles of growth, with each progressive circle an expansion on the
circumference of the one that came before. The scientific study of
dendrochronology records the life experience of the tree, just as each human
life, memory and precious moment lived becomes embedded within the work.
The retrieval of memory
also serves as a means for discarding it – re-evaluations of associated thoughts,
images and texts. The work Discarding
memory acts as a kind of visual and verbal catharsis for stored memories. Made from sections of previously used etching
plates, brought to light again in a new context, the work surveys the
"circumference" or the boundary between what is remembered and known,
to be transcended as new juxtapositions of image and text.
In the out in the I know nothing country
prints, a floating world of images are not anchored or contextualised in terms
of scale. Pollen looks like blood corpuscles or cellular organisms or even
atomic structure. Wire fences become repetitive markers, the man-made
boundaries which enclose, define and constrain the natural world. Her Petri
dishes are a microcosm of the wider landscape where she plays with our
understanding of words and their layers of meanings. "Plough", both a
noun and a verb, denotes the oldest of human tools and for millennia the
implement used to tame and subdue the natural environment. Ploughs create
patterns on a grand scale, the repetitive furrows in which the seed is planted.
Similarly "field" is a simple word, yet charged with meaning;
spatial, artistic, agricultural and spiritual. The field's circumference is
fenced, the land is tamed and with those actions come the human concepts of
ownership, inheritance and exploitation; nature is bent to the will of
humanity. A balance between the two is needed and Wilson-Adams suggests this
without being overtly didactic. Her literal and metaphoric wanderings in 'the I
know nothing country’ are deeply felt and highly personal explorations into the
still centre of both her own being and the natural world in which she lives and
travels.
Rebecca Gresham
Freelance writer and curator
[i]
[1]
disappearchitecture.blogspot.com/2010_06_01_archive.html
