The Shepherd's Crook
LIAM GARSTANG 21.06. – 21.07.18
As the Crow Flies: some notes on the recent work of Liam Garstang By Jan Guy Sometimes, place is fleeting, it passes through us as a cool breeze, invisible; unconsciously. Alternatively, it can cling to us, rage within us, embed itself in us like the little coffin endlessly growing from the ribcage of one of the Frees in Australian author David Ireland’s 1979 novel, A Woman of the Future. Place grows in us long after we have left it, it is constant, and sometimes, it draws us back again and again. It holds the memory of our recollections of events, it mirrors the cellular memory of our emotional bodies – love, fear, grief, aloneness, loss and belonging. It can also be a non-place we have never been, but is seemingly and unknowingly, born with us. Childhood and youth is a chaotic, vibrant ride - necessarily naive and reckless. Eventually, we are surrounded by pools of experience. Patterns begin to appear, the results of disparate incidents begin to merge, to make sense through the discourse of narrative. We add to our stories and they add to us. The complexity of this magnetic clustering of unlikely energies forms structures across time and space -animal and elemental forces of the earth, sky and water, long dead and pointing towards those not yet born. The artist regardless of prosthetic disposition is attracted to that which seems essential to their being, to their belonging in the world. The artist, Liam Garstang, was born into a fifth-generation farming family of the region around Wagga Wagga in New South Wales. The region’s name translates from the Wiradjuri language as ‘the place of many crows’. His Great Grandmother married into the Gestier family who began farming in Downside in the early 1900s. He chose to leave the family farm in his early twenties to study art. The 2018 photographic series, There’ll Be No More Shepherds, which is a homage to the last sheep on his grandfather’s land, transforms a distant vision of the collective flock to one of intimate and isolated portraiture. The animals’ figures appear as luminous apparitions in the dead of night. These photographs are not only portraits, but mnenomic forms of past generations and a contemporary metaphor for the matrix of human dynamics. The sheep’s eyes form waves of constellations across the night sky.
In Garstang’s Ricochet series, slabs of white clay are violently punctured by holes produced from a .22 rifle. These are holes of death’s impact, actions permanently frozen in the ceramic body and returned to us in the mirrored reflection of each twinkling entry point. They, like the sheep’s eyes, carry us between two worlds – one personal and individual and the other, collective and cosmological. One, a void made inescapable, teeming with matter and the other, a physical reality that dissipates in the conception of a starry transcendence. As a child, in that state between slumber and rising, Garstang would be woken by the light-hearted threat, ‘Get out of bed or the crows will peck your eyes out.’ In the paddocks amongst the lambing ewes, the crows would peck the eyes of the vulnerable mothers and their offspring as the hapless child would be stared down by the murder. In the work, Affirmation, the ancestors of those crows are forced to meet their own dead gaze. The eye of the crow is caught in the mirror, the mirror reflects the ricochets of constellation in the un-sound of a shotgun. The constellations return to the starry-eyed portraits of the last flock. There is a sense of eternal retribution in the crows’ narcissistic, predatory stare that catches one in a cyclic tension of a time and fear already passed. The individual work, The Shepherd’s Crook seems like old, faded footage not the contemporary video it is. It echoes early twentieth century silent films and the format of nineteenth century momento mori cards with the foregrounded wattle branches framing the shadowy dancer who moves in rhythm with two invisible partners This is the traditional Celtic dance of the Shepherd’s Crook, which comes at a celebratory night’s end. Here, near an end of times; it is the shepherd’s last dance. The apocalyptic shepherd of The Shepherd’s Crook shapeshifts in the video, The Gate to a contemporary, hooded, brooding boy-man. His painting gestures magically conjure the rural gate out of the darkness. It is both colonial boundary and portal whitewashed into existence. The gate exists in a void marking the hooded figure’s path as futile and the shepherd as shaman-trickster. There is hope given, but not the hope that soothes, that lulls. It is the hope of the hopeless, the derelict, dereliction, where all gesture is bb
rendered debris to be born repeatedly as a beautiful, compulsive hope. An absurd hope attached to the land, personal feelings, and our collective, redemptive expectations of the contemporary age. This notion of hope is repeated in two other videos, including Waiting, where the contemporary hooded boy-man becomes a scarecrow/shaman whose audible internal vibrations along with the calls of local birds, ‘sing’ the changing daylight, land and horizon into a final whiteout. The world reappears in the open expanses of the triptych drypoint series consisting of the Ghost House, The Witch is Well (windmill) and Harvest (a family’s tree) that sit in a twilight between the illusory power of representation, the concrete, material existence of the artist’s printed marks and the child’s pareidolic imaginary, but no less real, experience of place. This is a distant, matured view of the child’s topographical imagination – the house, the windmill, the tree are forlorn cut-outs, emptied of their emotional life, swept up in the black, fallow earth. Lines and images are entangled, energies made visible through the act of drawing harness a multitude of different times, different events. The exhibition, The Shepherd’s Crook carries an immense complexity; each work marked by the presence of the others through alternating lines of sight and oscillating spaces. Each work entwined in hallucinatory narratives and formal devices that belong both to art’s histories and contemporary psychosocial divisions of rural and urban life. The semi-biographical characters of shepherd, crow, scarecrow, trickster, and hooded boy-man wrap us in generational, collective, and geographical aspects of the everyday and yet, they also induce slippages into other worlds where heritage and times converge. The city lights veil the stars; on the open land, the constellations, the cosmos is near and crystal clear.
Jan Guy is an artist, writer, and lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney.
BIOGRAPHY Born 1983, Wagga Wagga, NSW. Lives and works in Sydney. 2008, Bachelor of Visual Arts, Honours (First Class), Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney 2014 – Current, Gallery Manager, SCA Galleries, Sydney College of the Arts 2016, Curator, Sunday Punch, St Jerome’s Laneways Festival, Sydney 2017, Curator, Nice One Picasso, St Jerome’s Laneways Festival, Sydney SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2018 The Shepherd’s Crook, Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney 2017 There’ll Be No More Shepherds (The Homecoming), Wagga Wagga Art Gallery 2013 To Kill The Saudade, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Project Space, Adelaide 2012 There’ll Be No More Shepherds, Cassa da Zorra, Evora, Portugal 2012 The Old Times Were Certainly The Scariest, Megalo Print Studios + Gallery, Canberra COLLABORATIVE EXHIBITIONS 2012 ‘With Eyelids Cut Off’, (with Adam Geczy), Wagga Wagga City Art Gallery, Riddoch Art Gallery, Mt Gambier
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2017 Macquarie Group Emerging Artist Prize, Space Gallery, Sydney 2017 Nice One Picasso, St Jerome’s Laneway Festival, Sydney 2017 New Acquisitions: From the Collections of Wagga Wagga Art Gallery, Wagga Wagga 2016 Sunday Punch, St Jerome’s Laneway Festival, Sydney 2013 The Fauvette Loureiro Memorial Artists’ Travel Scholarship, SCA Galleries, Sydney 2011 - 2013 Familiar/Unfamiliar, (curated by Rona Green) Latrobe Regional Gallery, 3contemporary Art Space, Melbourne, Tweed River Art Gallery, Swan Hill Regional Gallery, Cessnock Regional Gallery, Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery 2011 Freemantle Print Prize, Freemantle Arts Centre, Freemantle 2011 Performance 3, Peloton Gallery, Sydney 2011 In Residence, Megalo Print Studio + Gallery, Canberra 2010 Print Big, (curated by Alison Alder) Fitters Workshop, Canberra AWARDS 2017 Winner, Macquarie Group Emerging Ar8st Prize 2013 Finalist, The Fauve)e Loureiro Memorial Ar2sts’ Travel Scholarship, Sydney College of the Arts 2012 Ar8st in Residence, OBRAS Centre for Arts and Science, Evoramonte, Portugal 2011 Australia Council ArtStart Grant 2011 Finalist, Freemantle Print Prize, Freemantle Arts Centre, Freemantle 2010 Ar8st in Residence Award, Megalo Print Studios, Canberra 2008 The University of Sydney Honours Scholarship for Academic Excellence 2007 1st prize Drawing, Kempsey Council Art Award, (Judged by Prof Joanna Mendelssohn) 2007 The Charles William Wentworth Bursary, The University of Sydney
BIBLIOGRAPHY 2017 L Elliot, From Downside with Love, Weekend Advertiser, The Daily Advertiser, 19 Aug, p12 2013 A Geczy, To Kill The Saudade, exh cat. 2012 A Geczy, With Eyelids Cut Off, exh. cat. 2012 A Geczy, With Eyelids Cut Off, IMPRINT, Vol 47 No.3, p28 2012 L Elliot, Eyes Wide Open, Weekend Advertiser, The Daily Advertiser, 26 May, p13 2012 J Guy, Corvus Days, The Old Times Were Certainly The Scariest, exh. cat. 2011 C Morrow, Around the galleries, The South Sydney Herald, 11 Sept 2011, Review p14 2011 A Alder, Megalo Print Studio + Gallery, ACT, IMPRINT, Vol 46 No.3, p5 2010 B McConchie, Print Big, exh. cat. 2010 J Williams, Studio the image of success after 30 years, The Canberra Times, Sat 16 Oct, News, p7 2010 J Cheney, In praise of printing to impress, The Canberra Times, Sat 16 Oct, Review, p28 COLLECTIONS Macquarie Group Wagga Wagga Art Gallery Print Council of Australia Megalo Print Archive Private Collections, Sydney, Canberra
‘The Ghost House’, 2018, drypoint on Hahnemuhle 300 gsm paper, mounted on aluminium panel, 160 x 240 cm, edition of 3 +1 AP
‘The witch is well (The Windmill)’, 2018, drypoint on Hahnemuhle 300 gsm paper, mounted on alumnium panel, 160 x 240 cm, edition 3 + 1 AP
‘Harvest or a family’s tree’, 2018, drypoint on Hahnemuhle 300 gsm paper, mounted on alumnium panel, 160 x 240 cm, edition 3 + 1 AP
‘The divine’, 2018, HD video, edition of 3 + 1 AP, 09:45 min
‘Waiting’, 2018, HD video, edition of 3 +1 AP, 09:45 min
‘The Shepherd’s Crook’, 2018, HD video, edition of 3 + 1 AP, 02:17 min
‘The Gate’, 2018, HD video, edition of 3 + 1 AP, 18:50 min
‘Ricochet I’ #1-6, 2018, stoneware ceramics, 50 x 50 cm
‘There’ll Be No More Shepherds’ #1-10, 2018, pigment print face mounted to acrylic, 38 x 68 cm, editions of 5 + 1 AP
‘Ricochet II’ #1-5, 2018, stoneware ceramics, 50 x 50 cm
‘The other side of stone’, 2018, drypoint on Hahnemuhle 300 gsm paper, 25 x 25 cm, edition of 3 + 1 AP
‘Affirmations’, #1-5, 2018, Taxidermy crows, acrylic mirror, copper
www.dominikmerschgallery.com