Essay by Pat Hoffie.
Published in Art Monthly Issue 326 Summer 2020-21.
What does this mean, for an artist to attach ceramic objects to a gallery wall? Penny Evans is perhaps best known as a leading ceramic artist, although she works with a range of different media. Her forms are instantly recognisable. We look at them and see in double-vision: they often hover between performing a role as a functional item while proceeding to morph into other forms –plant-forms, sometimes marine forms where her use of Kamilaroi/Gomeroi mark-making have now become familiar patterns.
But these new forms in this current exhibition are different – reduced, minimal, mute.
This extended muteness, however, opens a portal towards another cadence of communication. Their sparseness allows the work to speak with an even greater clarity; with a focused intent that is simultaneously commanding and confronting.
But why the wall? Why not keep the ceramic forms to their place-ness, aligned to the horizontal? Why disrupt their object-hood? In what ways does this new orientation to the vertical plane demand that we, the viewer, might have to realign our responses?
These clay objects, built from the earth and forged through fire, have been raised up by Evans to meet us on our own axis.
We can no longer look downwards upon them, from a position of implied superiority. The implication of their serviceability has vanished. Instead, they look back at us. They confront us face-on; silently demand we reconsider what they might be; what they might mean. Expect that we might have to take the time to ask questions of ourselves about how we should respond.
For on this axis, we are confronted by something that is simultaneously an iteration of the land, a representation of the land and an interwoven system of stories about the land. The forms have been re-fashioned through a process of slow understanding during which the artist has repeatedly made returns to country; to ‘live on the land’, to share community and memories and stories with those who share that land-belonging with each other. A group of people who know that the very substance of the land on which they walk is composed, in part, of the residue of their ancestors’ flesh and blood and bones.
In this iteration we are ‘stared down’ by details of a land forged by the material efforts of generations of former custodians; a land that bears DNA evidence of tens of thousands of years
of former occupation; a land that is actually composed of the physical residue of these generations when their spirits have moved on from their bodies. The materials from which these objects have been re-composed have also been forged by fire; have gone through the furnace of a heat so intense that the very composition of the earth has been reconstituted. Just as it was transformed over great swathes of country across Australia. After the unprecedented fires of late 2019 passed, landscapes were left scarred and suffering. And those fires were ultimately just one more node of abuse in an ongoing story of land and water mismanagement in Australia. In Evans’ work it is as if the bones of country revisit us with a presence that calls out, in no uncertain terms, about what has ‘happened out there’. They make us aware that what has happened across the country will not, cannot, be assumed to have been left ‘out there’. They bear evidence that what has happened, what is still happening across our shared country, is affecting each part of our being, whether we are aware of it or not. The work reminds us that the cultural domain of gallery walls is, too, an extension of the country across which generations of devastation have occurred. In this sense, the work works as a ‘call to country’ expanding well beyond the usual short, self-contained introduction to an exhibition.
Evans refers to this body of work as a ‘language’. If so, then surely it is a language of silence. And one, in the artist’s own admission, that eludes encryption, that stops short of being easily translatable. In the place of words, the muteness of the pieces requires us to be hyper-conscious of their physical state; reminds us to pay attention to the shadows, to the spaces; intimates that we might begin to search for possible meanings in the system or scars and striations and cicatrices.
There is a pattern to these forms as they claim their place on the wall – glyphs that suggest wounds. Evans writes of this sign-system as a language that “we don’t understand ourselves”. In spite of broken continuities, broken families and lost languages, a core-deep continuity calls the artist – and the others with whom she travels – back again and again to
make responses to country. Like a somnambulist searching for clues to a half-forgotten dream, Evans gathers together the grim remnants of the evidence she retrieves.
Her bleak harvest is a series of scars – bone-dry shapes she arranges into the most simple forms – a circle, a cross, the Aboriginal symbol for ‘sitting-in-sand’,
a digging stick, a necklace stringing together a harrowing crop of empty, bloodied sockets. It’s hard to say where the land stops and the artist’s body starts in the material properties of these works. The dry, cracked clay bears evidence of the artist’s process. It is as if the long linear forms have come into being through the artist’s wringing of her hands. As if the repetition of the marks has been meted out through the staccato rhythm of her personal grief. And there are other elements – string made from the artist’s hair; the split-quill feathers of an emu. There is an implied continuity between ancestors, the land, the creatures and plant forms that depend on it, and the artist herself. Evans speaks of the effects of intergenerational trauma – of the wounds that, unresolved, are passed on to fester towards the future, infecting the possibilities of surviving and thriving to full potential. The wounds, then, have found their way onto the gallery walls. Their presence here implies that when the land is not respected, when its first nations people are not respected, all of Australian culture suffers. But there are other ways of reading these scars. In Aboriginal culture, cicatrices are the proud outward evidence of trials undertaken and overcome. As she has written, “each deliberately placed scar tells a story of pain, endurance, identity, status, beauty, courage, sorrow and grief”. This overlaying of references flit like the pale shadows thrown by these fragile forms; shadows thrown by
these fragile forms; the simplest of symbols reverberate with references that are both deeply personal and broadly evocative. To the artist, the ‘X’ form evokes the mark made by her great-grandmother when colonising processes insisted on her on-paper response to their bureaucratic demands. Like so many first-nations people, the evidence of individual lives in birth certificates, marriage documents, identification and proof of ownership was reduced to anonymity and an over-writing of historical testimony.
But to the artist, that same ‘X’ calls to mind a simple little creature that lives in the country tended for generations by her ancestors. The same ‘X’ is found on the back of the Crucifix Frog, a practical, self-contained little amphibian that has learned to deal with the extremes of the land in imaginative and astonishing ways. Burying itself deep in mud as drought approaches, it exudes its own protective cocoon to enshrine it while it enters a state of suspended animation until the long-awaited rains bring the country back to life once more. Not one to entertain the folly of waste, the crucifix frog’s first meal is to devour the little cocoon that has protected it for the duration of its hibernation. And it emerges from its long, dun-coloured tomb bearing an astonishing cruciform apostematism(1) that could only be described as bejewelled resplendence.
If the first impact of entering Evans’ new installation carries with it the Look
longer. Look harder into those cracks and cicatrices. They offer clues about a first-nations cosmology not so far removed from the tenets of Christendom that still form, like it or not, so much of the structure of our own culture. Peer, like St. Thomas(2), into where the moisture glistens. Peep, if you dare, more closely into the wounds and the scars. Might it be possible that here and there, a glistening of new life catches the light? Could it be that there, beneath the dry, dusty bleached bones, there might be tiny possibilities of new futures?
If, by the artist’s admission, this work has evolved as a response to a deep resignation brought about from decades of witnessing ongoing abuse to the land, to its creatures, to its people, then it is also a work informed by this land’s secret, sacred promises of redemption. For Kamilaroi/Gomeroi people know all too well, that for as long as they have walked this land, they have shared it with others. Among these is that diminutive amphibian whose capacity for miraculous survival is emblazoned on its back in the form of what botanists refer to as a ‘Holy Cross’. Its capacity for re-emergence from the most desiccated pockets of what might appear, at surface level, as an embodiment of Eliot’s ‘Wasteland’(3), blazing and glittering,
generation after generation with the will-to-live, is a resplendent reminder of redemption; one that rivals all the glittering domes of Byzantium(4).
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