L E N O R E
This exhibition consolidates the artist’s rich, visual lexicon of stylistic and conceptual explorations developed over the course of her career.”
Beyond the Sight of Land 11 SEPTEMBER —— 30 OCTOBER 2021
HOWARD
WORDS: Susan Reid September 2021
N O R T H Image courtesy of the artist.
Queensland artist Lenore Howard has contributed to the creative milieu of the Far North for over four decades–significantly through her contemporary art practice and as an arts educator and mentor. This exhibition consolidates the artist’s rich, visual lexicon of stylistic and conceptual explorations developed over the course of her career. For example, until the early 2000’s, the artist crafted a re-imagined surreal magic to navigate deeply personal life stories and social commentaries. Spiritually-infused, luminous abstractions then emerged in her work from the mid 2000’s. Taking time with the works in this exhibition allows these conceptual inheritances to emerge. Cumulatively they bring together a quality of aesthetic wisdom. It is this creative ballast that enables Howard to let risks into the studio; navigate and improvise with them; and confront their challenges with deep curiosity and openness. Howard executes this with persistent imagination and bravura. The artist’s aesthetic wisdom is forged in experience and knowledge of the technologies of aesthetic assemblage, the architecture of composition, the agency of colour and its harmonic, textures and pitches.
All this grounds the rigour of her creative intuitions. In this recent body of work, aesthetic styles and genres appear to morph through forms and temporal scales. Consider the dynamic construction of Beyond the Sight of Land 13 a playful offering of whimsical abstract forms that teeter on the brink of shattering. A surreal quality imbues the assemblage with a quality of animated thingness; an entity in its own right. In other works, built scaffolds of past works are purposefully broken and their disassembled pieces co-opted into new surface assemblages. Golden ochre and turquoise pigments, laid and sealed over many months, are disinterred to meet the light again. Highly abstracted forms create spaces in which slivers of surreal magic press forward. There is an element in Beyond the Sight of Land 3 that gestures to an open door; and the lithic form in Beyond the Sight of Land 7 hints of an abstracted boulder with its shadow cast onto the wall. Past aesthetic and stylistic concerns are pulled into correspondence with the present and the tension this creates is quite unsettling. This holding present of the past is evident too in Beyond the Sight of Land 2 whereby improvised line-work is layered over and
northsite.org.au/exhibitions/beyond-the-sight-of-land/
NorthSite Contemporary Arts
Lenore Howard, Beyond the Sight of Land 2, 2021, acrylic and oil paint, ink, canvas on acrylic board , 1370 x 1260 mm, photo: Michael Marzik
Lenore Howard, Beyond the Sight of Land 13, 2021, acrylic and oil paint, canvas, on acrylic board and perspex, 1350 x 1965 mm, photo: Michael Marzik
Lenore Howard, Beyond the Sight of Land 6, 2021, acrylic and oil paint on acrylic board with burnt reclaimed timber, 1960 x 2255 mm, photo: Michael Marzik
northsite. org.au Lenore Howard, Beyond the Sight of Land 7, 2021, acrylic and oil paint on acrylic board, 1470 x 1500 mm, photo: Michael Marzik
Lenore Howard, Beyond the Sight of Land 3, 2021, acrylic and oil paint on acrylic board, 1125 x 1190 mm, photo: Michael Marzik
Lenore HOWARD 1 Kuku-yalanji Nation/ Wakamin Country
Essay by Susan Reid, Arts Writer NorthSite Contemporary Arts is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. NorthSite is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.
Beyond the Sight of Land corralled into larger architectural forms. This is not to prematurely resolve aesthetic tensions but to insist on dialogue within those earlier tensions and terms. The walls also lose their neutrality as background spaces and are recruited into the works in ways that untether any sense of spatial orthodoxy. A single insight or encounter with a mark, form or mood that chimes can stir an artist’s imagination into new conceptual realms. That same insight could just as easily dominate processes and stifle the emergence of other ideas. Howard recognises these moments, stays awhile with their unsettling, and activates equivocation itself into the work. It’s a dynamic akin to the ancient Greek concept of ‘pharmakon’ whereby a physical, conceptual or behavioural element is understood to hold potential both as remedy or poison. A contemporary element sometimes added to this binary is that of indeterminacy.
In the ambiguous morphing of genres and forms, the dynamic potential inherent in the question of ‘this or that?’ is held in the agentic valency of ‘or’. The lively interplay between different tensions of the artistic pharmakon is discernible through many of Howard’s recent mixed-media wall installations, monotypes, and ceramic works. While not dominating her practice, issues of environmental disassociation and degradation can be traced in this recent work. For example, the charcoal drawings produced during field trips to the dry scrubby Country1 near Chillagoe reference the elemental intensity of recent fire seasons. The hatch of burnt timber in Beyond the Sight of Land 6 evokes the destructive effects of extreme fire but then the work subsumes this element into a surreal-abstract drama that takes on a celestial quality, pulling each element into correspondence.
Time and again, the works gathered in this exhibition nudge and coax us to also extend ourselves beyond everyday concerns. A coalescence of worlds connecting intimately within other worlds is evoked within Beyond the Sight of Land 11 each resonating form creating unique frequencies of tension. The performativity of the work democratises the significance of these tensions. A matt-black, light-absorbing block imperceptibly transduces the work’s aesthetic events. Just look at how a single, notched band draws the innermost abraded form toward a point where the collective body is stroked by the slimmest of bows. There is such sonic potential in that exchange and its frequencies correspond with a cascade of small black tumbling forms.
Lenore Howard, Beyond the Sight of Land 11, 2021, acrylic and oil paint, canvas, plywood, timber dowel, on acrylic board, 2260 x 2515 mm, photo: Michael Marzik