Kerrie Poliness Carolyn Barnes
1. Marc Augé, Non Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe, Verso, London, 1995, p. 86.
Back and Forth 2018–2022 is one of many travelling exhibitions of diamond painting by Kerrie Poliness, each documented in the form of videos or postcards. This multilayered work reflects Poliness’s interlinked interest in aspects of the world that are imperceptible to our senses and how art’s institutional operation isolates it from broader fields of experience. The anchoring principle here—represented by the pink diamond painting propped against the railings of a Queenscliff to Sorrento ferry—is the illusory nature of horizontality and verticality. What we perceive as horizontal or vertical lines always diverge slightly from the right angle, these tiny deviations potentially leading to large end-effects. For Poliness, the partiality of our knowledge of conditions in the universe drives human hubris in thinking that nature can be controlled despite natural systems consisting of countless dynamically interacting elements at the macro and micro scale.
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For Poliness, we live in a diagonal universe where all lines inevitably intersect. In her ‘wave’ drawings, small anomalies of execution push a network of lines in unpredictable ways across a gallery wall or a section of pavement or lawn. In Back and Forth, the path of the ferry and other boats and the shape of the seabed and coastline interact with tidal flows to create irregular wave patterns on the water, the work highlighting the phenomenon of intrinsic randomness, where even exact knowledge of the initial state of things permits only probabilistic predictions of what will unfold. As the ferry decks rise and fall, irregularities in the shape of the water against the coastline are revealed. The surface of the bay is in constant motion. No straight lines—a primary marker of industrial, capitalist modernity—here. The diamond painting, ferry decks and railings are the constants in each image, but all else is in flux. Are the ferries moving across the water or are they still and it is the world that is moving beneath them?
Marc Augé argues that in modernity, all places eventually become places that people travel through; travel is integral to the spatial logic of modernity, but in this the experience of place is lost.1 The looped videos in Back and Forth amplify the ferries’ cyclic travel between Queenscliff and Sorrento. At the midpoint of each video, there is a moment where the ferries reach the same point in their journey, disrupting the sense of progress through time and space. Poliness’s choice of where to hold an exhibition is always important in terms of human history or geological time, contesting the problematic structure of temporal consciousness in modernity. She has mounted exhibitions of diamond paintings from Lake Bolac in central Victoria to Zagreb, Croatia, each interrupting the flow of everyday life to highlight something missed. An exhibition in suburban Footscray marks the edge of an ancient lava flow. The ferries in Back and Forth cross an area that before the last ice–age was the grassland home of the Boonwurrung and Wathaurang people, whose oral histories record this fact. Where today there is an international shipping channel, the Yarra River flowed, cascading down a waterfall where the head of the bay exists today before travelling on to join the Tamar River in Tasmania. While the art gallery is the main physical site of contemporary art today, Poliness’s informal exhibitions of diamond paintings travel to critical locations, restoring abstraction to the world as a catalyst for observation and recognition.
Kerrie Poliness Back and Forth 2018–2022
