7 minute read
The Collection: New Acquisitions by Cath Barcan and Julie Harris
In April this year we welcomed two new additions to the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre Collection by Blue Mountains artists Cath Barcan (Glenbrook) and Julie Harris (Blackheath).
Cath Barcan
In 2019 Cath Barcan exhibited her body of work Nature morte/ Civil works as part of the Exposé Program at Blue Mountains City Art Gallery. For this exhibition Cath created the series Civil works, of which four were chosen to be acquired for the Collection: Landscape II, Landscape III, Landscape IV and Plinth.
CATH BARCAN, Landscape IV 2017-19, archival inkjet pigment print, 61 x 88 cm. Purchased through the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre Collection Acquisition Fund 2020.
Cath Barcan talks to Artistic Program Manager, Sabrina Roesner:
SR: Cath, you have had strong photographic practice for the last 30 years. In most recent times you have focussed on series of works concerned with wrapped food and landscapes, highlighting the materiality of plastic and our complex relationship with it. Tell us what brought you to investigate these ideas, and how your artistic approach has developed over recent years. CB: My 2019 exhibition Nature morte/Civil works brought together the twin obsessions of my recent practice. The Nature morte room held still lives of wrapped food, and the Civil works room held images of draped landscapes. I made the work over the preceding five years or so, and had initially considered them to be two different bodies of work, but I gradually came to view them in an intertwined way.
Both series of work started out with modest aims and approaches, photographing the things and places that were part of my everyday. Roadworks on the daily commute, bags of shopping on the kitchen bench. Initially, I was driven by formal elements: light and tone, composition and colour. I enjoyed the creative problem-solving of constructing small compositions in my studio, and of using the viewfinder to isolate large compositions in the world. This type of visual problem solving can be very satisfying, and by remaining curious, layers of meaning begin to grow in the work. The photographic medium by nature is one of scrutiny; looking at the world, looking through the lens, then editing the image. I produce my own prints, so for me this detailed examination continues in that process. The way the work is framed and installed again involves detailed visual analysis. I love how being deeply involved in looking for and at an image creates a space for meaning, intention and complexity to develop and accrue. Sometimes, it was there all along, and I just needed time to see it.
SR: You depict plastic in a fascinating way: On the one hand your photographs reveal the beauty of its material and on the other they make us question the ever-present role it has in our lives and its short-lived use. Can you talk more about some of the clues and techniques you use in your works? CB: One of the things I was trying to do was make the material look quite beautiful. Soft plastics are seductive, pliant, translucent and fall into fascinating folds and creases. Unless we stop to think, we may not appreciate the profound problematics of the material. Creating ‘beautiful’ images using comfortingly familiar painterly tropes is a device to keep the viewer looking; hopefully long enough to consider the toxicity and damage bound up in the production, overuse, and careless disposal of the material.
SR: Can you tell us more about the Civil works series: Where did you take the photographs and what drew you to these draped construction sites? CB: Most of these works were taken in the Blue Mountains, and a small number in Kingswood. I drove past many these construction sites almost every day on my way to work. I was compelled by them. Each time I had to drive past I felt a sharp pang of regret. I promised myself I would make the time to stop, and this became more and more urgent as I saw extraordinary visual opportunities appear, and then, as construction work progressed, disappear, sometimes in a matter of days. So, in the first instance, the locations came to me. As my obsession developed, I actively sought out places where civil works were being undertaken. This was not a difficult task.
These sites struck me as a type of reverse archaeology, with layers being progressively built up, and forms and materials concealed and revealed. They reminded me of giant pieces of public art, not unlike the way Jeanne-Claude and Christo wrapped Little Bay. They looked like curtains, stage sets, temples and rubbish dumps. They were fragile and monolithic, channelled water, held back subsidence, and resembled moonscapes and giant flags. They claimed and reclaimed. They looked like the future we still have time to change.
Julie Harris
Born in Sydney, Julie Harris lives and works in Blackheath, NSW. Throughout her career she has developed a pictorial language of considerable integrity. She has created an organic and inclusive body of work and in it discovered an apt metaphor for communicating the shifting structure of her experience. Her work The Dark Stations has been acquired for the Collection.
JULIE HARRIS The Dark Stations 2011, (detail) ink on paper, 70 x 50 cm each. Purchased through the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre Collection Acquisition Fund 2020.
Julie Harris talks to Curator, Rilka Oakley:
RO: You have talked about your work being unintentional and inspired by the notion of chance theory and the unconscious. How does this play out in your creative process? JH: My mark-making is driven by the sub-conscious and is automatic. Chance plays a huge role. When I say unintentional what I am trying to do is to make it as free or as intuitive as possible. My paintings are created by a performance with my marks coming from my subconscious rather than a contrived, structured piece. I may destroy the marks, wash them away and only have traces left. It is those traces that start dictating how the painting is going to be. I try to take away the self-consciousness of the painting and any obvious marks.
Abstraction is the foundation of my training and I prefer this as an intellectual and creative pursuit. I like the process of abstraction, the lack of self-consciousness. The process is one of addition and subtraction, errors and resolution, repetition and chance. It is neither a safe or predictable process, but it produces an aesthetically satisfying and emotionally cogent object. The search to make work out of chaos and achieve some sort of spatial logic remains the challenge.
RO: We have recently acquired your 2011 work The Dark Stations. Can you tell me what the title refers to and why you made this work? JH: I was asked to do Station 13 (2010) by Rev. Dr Douglas Purnell (OAM) as part of an Easter exhibition. He asked different artists to each produce an artwork reflecting on a Station of the Cross. I decided I would have to produce the whole story of the Stations to make sense of an individual work; it needed to be read as part of a larger framework. This fitted nicely into the format of my work at the time, which I called ‘walkthroughs’.
I needed to tease out my own interpretation of the Stations. I saw the biblical story of the journey of the cross to Golgotha as a metaphor for a life’s journey, an extended ‘walkthrough’, along which the viewer has to proceed. I wanted to provide a space for reflection. I called the resulting work The Dark Stations because of the inherent darkness of the story and also the visual blackness of ink.
RO: Can you explain more about what the term ‘walkthrough’ means to you and how it influences this work? JH: From 2000 on, I was assembling individual works on paper into what I call ‘walkthroughs’. These are a way of interpreting a particular place, of finding symbols or signifiers and shorthand for consolidating information for myself. Strung together they are like a storyboard of ideas, which then coalesce into a singular work.
They are also about the underlying structure in things, such as the repetitions found in fractal geometry. I was looking for underlying patterns and abstract qualities in the natural landscape and the ways in which the whole is repeated in the miniature.
RO: Much of your work is influenced by the landscape/environment around you at the time of making. Can you explain how these works are connected to the Blue Mountains landscape? JH: I made this work when I lived in Kurrajong, in the Blue Mountains. It was in a very different environment to where I had been living in Wollombi. The studio backed onto the mountains and suddenly I had vistas and panoramas instead of the close chaos of the bush. The influence of these views started to appear in my work and I started to explore this with pours of ink and tonal layering.
My paintings and drawings are always layered, made and unmade so the materiality of the paint becomes the painting ‘like a residue of the process’ (Jupp Linssen). I like the history of the making to be a part of the works. The painting becomes the director of its own theatre.
