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ARTHOUSE GALLERY
Rushcutters Bay, NSW
1st - 16th May 2020
River Language
Artist Statement
Kate Dorrough
The river, a source of fertility and a vital and pivotal life force with its cyclical nature of renewal and destruction.
In our nations psyche with limited water resources; droughts and floods mark our consciousness. The river is a potent historical and cultural emblem embedded in our literature and our inherited visual language.
This exhibition has evolved from my ongoing exploration of the river within my art practice. This is not a specific landscape but an evolution of inner recollections and previous art residencies, becoming a reduced and abstracted essence of the river.
Embedded in the works are memories and recollections of swimming in warm shallow amber gum leaf stained river edges and cool mysterious deep green umber depths. For me the river is a place of connection, a journey undertaken and a vehicle back to a slower pace and sense of place.
Abstracted gestural calligraphic marks float above an expansive space of bleached and stained canvas or fields of painterly marks. Colours transfuse from pinks, to gold to blues, depending on the heat of the day. The marks made on these watery landscapes are like a text or a series of musical notes, an implied language to be understood or deciphered. The works acknowledge our need to understand the river in order to work with and preserve its fragile ecosystems.
Working in both the discipline of painting and hand built stoneware ceramics, the exhibition explores the interrelation between the gestural painterly mark and the hand built three-dimensional form, creating a conversation between paint and clay.
Layers of acrylic paint combined with the texture and weave of the linen’s surface gives a density and depth mirrored in the materiality and tactility of ceramics. Building with a coiling technique, rudimentary ceramic forms evolve over a period of time to become painterly sculptural objects. With numerous firings, iron oxide within the stoneware clay bleeds through layers of glaze, slips and stains, creating an alchemy of glaze, gestural marks and clay.
The process of layering paint and clay, revealing and disguising the mark, echoes a layering of told and untold stories and collected memories of the river. Calligraphic marks become a series of signs or totems, is it a language of layered histories and unearthed mysterious relics.
The river becomes a place of remembering, broad and strong; it is a region of our mind, a unifying and iconic symbol.
Essay
Eli Walsh
‘River Language’ continues Kate Dorrough’s ongoing focus on the river as a fundamental source of fertility within the Australian landscape. In her large-scale paintings and hand-built ceramic forms, the Sydney artist posits the river as a vital life force, with its cyclical nature of renewal and destruction, whilst also considering its importance as a potent historical and cultural emblem embedded in our literature and inherited visual language. The works siphon memories of places experienced during Dorrough’s art residencies and travels in Australia, yet these are not portraits of particular landscapes – they are evocations, distillates, capturing the essence of things seen, felt and imagined.
In a country marked by droughts, floods and fires, water is the nucleus of our individual, communal and cultural life. Even though we identify with the river, Dorrough renders it as a life force beyond our control; beyond out cognition. Drawing from this existential tenor of water, she envisions the river as a symbolic language to be deciphered. ‘The river is political, and a place of remembering. Broad and strong, the river is a unifying symbol,’ reflects the artist. She reduces the land to a sequence of abstracted calligraphic marks and incisions unfurling across canvas and clay. Scrawled like a scribbly gum script, these gestures conjure an implied language, or poetry, as Dorrough acknowledges our need to understand the river in order to preserve its fragile ecosystems. The river, trees, rocks and broad spatial vistas become a series of totems demarcating the wisdom of an enduring Australian landscape.
Inspired by the forms of Ancient Greece and Etruscan vessels, Dorrough’s new series of River Heads mimic water jugs, yet their spouts and suggestions of handles are far from utilitarian. Water, here, is not as a resource to be used and consumed; but something to be venerated and preserved. These sculptural personifications of the river function as totems representing the destructive and the archaic, tempered with a hint of humour. The land becomes vessel, literally and symbolically. A vessel of life, of language, and of lost histories.
The cross fertilisation of hand-built ceramic forms with paintings on linen speak to the dynamism of the river, with its dualities of fluidity and solidity, transience and endurance. Limber brushstrokes, amorphic forms and gestural glazes dance in and out of recognition, while the stratified verticality of the compositions point to the memories and histories lodged and layered in the land. Dorrough’s stoneware ceramic forms evolve over time with numerous firings, where iron oxide bleeds through strata of glaze and slips, forming surfaces that summon the cool physicality of the river. Sensorial vignettes are evoked by Dorrough’s stained linen canvases and swathes of acrylic, which elicit recollections of swimming in warm, shallow, Gum leaf-stained river edges and cool mysterious umber depths. This alchemic process of layering paint and glazes echoes a rich reservoir of stories told and untold – the memories of the river.
