Pulse by Sue Starcken and Confectioneer’s Digest by Stuart Elliot, Lost Eden Creative
I have recently embarked upon a journey to learn more about the history of Western Australian visual art. It is a field that is still ripe for exploration, with many lacunae and a hesitantly sketched and incomplete topography on the charts. Dragons and inland seas may yet populate the places that are poorly documented in this history. But equally the absence and the silence may in fact reflect a kind of cultural desert.
It is, of course, a matter of perspective. Tom Gibbons (1998) once described the Perth into which he arrived in the 1950s as existing on a starvation diet of culture — in comparison to the cultural experiences he left behind in Salford, UK. I also think of Durer’s rhinoceros and Stubbs’ kangaroo, fantastic beasts imagined from a described reality, or De Vlamingh’s “rats” (quokkas) on Rottnest, all efforts to depict and describe things for which the language of the foreign observer was ill-equipped. The challenge of local art history is about many degrees of separation from the established canon of an international art history, and the difficulty of documenting a local history in a language that does not betray itself as a pidgin dialect.
I have scarcely begun to scratch the surface of this history, but this particular interest has started to colour the way in which I look at and engage with the work of contemporary Western Australian artists. Currently on show at Lost Eden Creative in Dwellingup are two exhibitions that have given me much to think about in this respect: Pulse, by Sue Starcken and Confectioneer’s Digest, by Stuart Elliott. It strikes me that a fruitful dialogue between the two shows emerges from the different ways in which they offer a kind of archaeological experience for the viewer.
Starcken’s etchings are deliberate accumulations of imagery built up in carefully ordered strata. They incorporate a range of finely articulated botanical motifs, and historical architectural drawings, all arrayed in strongly symmetrical patterns. They make a subtle feature of the figurative elements, carefully etched into the plates, and the plates themselves assert a strong, tessellating geometry as they have been repositioned again and again for new impressions.
Traditionally etching is an artform valued for its capacity to render atmospheric images in a reproducible format, making images widely accessible. Starcken’s unique state prints use the same techniques, but step well beyond the reliable reproduction of an image from the plate, there are many irretrievable processes and decisions that intervene between the preparation of the plate and the realisation of the composition on its support.
Engaging with Starcken’s works is a process of excavation and profoundly conveys a sense in which these pieces embody the time invested in their painstaking creation. Here the evidence of the maker’s hand is not primarily gestural or textural, but rather reveals itself as methodical intervention. Like the archaeologist, we sift through the layers to make sense of the features that show themselves to have been produced by forces other than nature.
But it’s not all about the revelation and solving the riddle, there are layers to work through, and depths to explore. In the works on Belgian linen, like The Furies, botanical and organic imagery operates to dissolve and diffuse the demarcation between figure and ground, an effect that is enhanced by subtle modulations in the tone and intensity of the ink. In the four pieces in the Pulse series, the fine graphic quality of the engraver’s line is both celebrated and subverted by overlapping images to create the complex composition.
The composite images are reminiscent of kaleidoscopes and Rorschach inkblots, but also evoke the ornate formality of religious objects and embellished symbols. Ultimately I read these works as pieces about searching and interrogating our instinct to try to articulate sense-making and purpose. They present the viewer with fugitive symbols on the verge of familiarity, but which refuse to settle into determinacy. Is our search for meaning one that we carry out through the senses, and by collecting the pieces and reassembling the world, past or present? Or does our search take us inside ourselves, into the mind and the nervous system, and the labyrinthine mysteries therein?
Stepping through into the rear gallery, the tone darkens from the uncertain in Starcken’s work to the unsettling in Elliott’s work. Where Starcken’s works in shades of grey created a translucent realm neither wholly light nor dark, Elliott’s polychrome world in the round presents us with collected specimens and artefacts that would scare us in the dark, and make us squirm (and chuckle) in the daylight.
In this small space, Elliott has assembled no fewer than 57 works in diverse media. The Confectioneer’s Digest is a kind of off-colour sweet shop, annexed to a tinkerer’s tool-shed. There are collections of curiosities, displays of undigestible delicacies, utensils of uncertain purpose, and icons of industrial detritus. As with any good curiosity shop, or side-show experience, it is the eclecticism of the assemblage that invites a thorough rummage, motivated by a morbid fascination with the odd and/or the promise of discovering something of hitherto unrecognised value. It has the same appeal famously celebrated by the Surrealists in “the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella” (Comte de Lautreamont, 1869).
But, of course, little has been left to chance in this selection. There is a kind of taxonomy going on in these works. Firstly, there are a large number of specimen paintings that feature a single, not-quite identifiable object rendered against a simple ground. Secondly, there are a range of images and sculptures that create a kind of tableau of objects in space. Thirdly there are depictions of figures presented as icons. And lastly there are sculptural objects that imply a kind of instrumentality and not-quite domestic utility.
The “specimen” paintings include a series of jewel-like miniatures that take as their subject decaying lemons collected from under the artist’s tree, but presented like geological samples, or bone fragments. Then there are a series of nine paintings of identical square format that feature a range of unidentifiable materials served up and depicted like a café chalk-board or a photographic menu board from the local lunch bar. The third series of “specimen” paintings are presented much like the lemons, but depict single objects of unknown origin or substance — some appear to be biological, others man-made, and still others seem to be a combination of flesh and fabrication. Altogether, there is something about all of these works that offer their subjects up for veneration — whether in the context of the museum, the restaurant or the reliquary. They are exquisitely painted and carefully presented — but how much packaging does it take to make their subjects palatable and appealing?
The “tableau” works include paintings and digital prints, and some sculptural pieces. Unlike the “specimen” paintings, these works depict objects in space. Many of these works in this show feature a cake motif which assumes a wide range of guises in Elliott’s work. It is a pennant-flying outpost on a remote frontier. It is a trojan horse. It is an armoured and steam-propelled juggernaut. It is a bunker or a pill-box. It is an industrial vessel for the (ineffectual) containment of disaster. What does it all mean? “Let them have cake” is the oft-quoted quip of a despotic and decadent French monarch. Elliott here provides a patisserie cabinet full of serving suggestions.
The iconographic elements of Elliott’s work are applied across much of his oeuvre, particularly in the format of works and custom-built frames and special tables for the display of his work, as can be seen in this exhibition. But I have long been interested in Elliott’s treatment of the figure in his work, which I think deserves special mention in terms of their iconography. One of the stand-out features of Elliott’s figures is that they are almost exclusively clad from head to toe in some form of PPE (personal protective equipment). In this exhibition there are three such characters: one dressed like a gas-mask equipped German stormtrooper of WWI; another in some kind of bio-hazard regalia; and the third is reminiscent of Ned Kelly. The figures are faceless, drab, and slouch without purpose, irrespective of the items they hold in their hands. These figures are icons for a place where humanity is constantly at risk from its own endeavours, and beg the question about just what kind of humanity occupies these outfits or even what vestiges of humanity remain under the masks.
Among Elliott’s works that I most enjoyed in this exhibition are a series of sculptural works that have been presented like cooking and serving utensils. There are tongs, forks, rollers, and pliers, all of which have been modified as aids for consumption. The tongs, for instance, (Stand Off Masticator) have their own teeth. Like the museum artefact or a religious relic, these are objects whose utility and mundanity has been overwritten with symbolic and interpretive significance — in this case the objects themselves have taken on a sort of playful, prosthetic humanity.
So whilst Starcken’s Pulse is like the experience of the archaeological dig itself, Elliott’s Confectioneer’s Digest is like a museum of already collected objects. Both require us to try and imagine the civilisation that is responsible for their creation from the fragmentary evidence that we have in front of us. So, what might be said of the “Western Australian-ness” of these artists, evident in their work? I think that there are at least a couple of interesting lines of inquiry here.
Firstly, it has been observed by Gary Werskey (2016) that in an Australian context, the importance of the print as an artform has been significantly down-played in our art history in favour of the oil paintings of the Heidelberg School. Yet works on paper, like the print and the watercolour, played a very significant role in the development of art practice in Australia and especially in Western Australia, because of the greater accessibility of these artforms and materials. So there is an important sense in which etchings like Starcken’s expand upon a much longer, continuous history of local (settler) art practice than more celebrated media such as painting in oils.
Secondly, I think that Elliott’s practice is a fascinating counterpoint to the Australian landscape tradition and has its roots firmly here in Western Australia. The natural landscape is in fact a conspicuous absence in the work of Elliott. But in our Western Australian context the natural landscape is, to a large degree, a resource to be consumed, and a setting for industry and endeavour in support of that consumption. These industrious and itinerant tradies are the people that populate Elliott’s artworks, and the desolate landscapes in his works anticipate the impending industrial wastelands that much better represent our Western Australian civilisation than the romantic remains of rural Australia celebrated in the mythology underpinning much Australian art.
While I write this at a time when these exhibitions have only a few short days remaining on show, I heartily recommend a day-trip to Dwellingup to see them. For the money that one might spend on parking in Perth or Fremantle, one can drive an hour out of town to see some of the best visual art on show in Western Australia. For those interested in Western Australian contemporary art, Lost Eden Creative should become a fixture on our gallery-visiting itineraries.
All images courtesy of the artists and used with kind permission.
