OCEANIC POETRY
Slack Water begins and ends with the ocean. Starting as a creative exchange between artist Arryn Snowball and poet Nathan Shepherdson, Slack Water has been evolving and expanding for several years. This exhibition, hosted by both Pinnacles Gallery and the University of the Sunshine Coast (USC) Art Gallery, is a distinctive evolution of a project; a part of a slowly changing continuum of ideas and images, which have appeared in various stages in different places with poetry and anthropology at its heart. These seemingly disparate and ethereal bodies of work, however, are united in their beginnings and through the artist’s continued dedication to the exploration of materials. Over the last decade, Snowball’s practice has broadened to include photography, video and performance, all of which have been faithful to Snowball’s artistic modus operandi. Much of this has been shed in Slack Water with the artist recommitting to their first love, physical media. Slack Water had its visual beginnings in Snowball’s responses to a series of poems by Shepherdson. These ongoing meditations on the splendour and vastness of the Pacific Ocean are in turn playful, earnest and whimsical. The fisherman’s bible, Ern Grant’s Grant’s Guide to Fishes (1965), was used as a conceptual starting point for Shepherdson’s 77 poems, which were in turn visually ‘translated’ by Snowball through fragments of text reinterpreted into drawings and studies. These evolved into a vast, encompassing work, sometimes joined by sound and performance. Shepherdson has an evocative and acutely visual style, and a unique understanding of the connections between painting and poetry. Many poets aspire to paint, and many painters aspire to write poetry. There is an unforced and natural resonance between poetry and painting, just as there is between Snowball and Shepherdson. The text works that form Mammoth (2017-ongoing) outlined an early structural approach that would inform Slack Water. Comprising dozens of small ink text drawings, installed in a rigid, gridded fashion, Mammoth is one of the earlier, and longer-running bodies of work making up Slack Water, and in some ways embodies the exhibition’s multifaceted and iterative nature. The texts used in the work are drawn directly from Shepherdson’s poems, Grant’s Guide to
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Fishes, and scientific literature provided by Snowball’s partner, Monica Vasile, which includes phrases taken from anthropology, geology, physics, neurology, and climate change. Each piece is broken down into a series of geometric positive and negative spaces. These are legible, but the emphasis is shifted from the words themselves to their form and shape encouraging equal meditation on etymology, poetry and visual character. Installed tightly, the grid can be arranged instinctively so the edges of words and phrases and the positive and negative spaces between them form new and unexpected shapes and passages of text. Like Mammoth itself, the works that comprise Slack Water incorporate disparate ideas (the act of fishing, physics, light and water, sky and horizon, surface and depths, the dissolution of being), which are rooted in the artist’s insistence on testing materiality as a response to, or document of, the world. Mammoth is Snowball’s oeuvre in miniature; a versatile, poetic and visually engaging work that can expand and contract according to its display, to say nothing of its endless potential for rearrangement and recombination. It is a remarkably singular work despite its constant change constituent upon the artist’s whims, and yet still greater than the sum of its parts. Snowball’s work here, as ever, confounds neat summary—reaching beyond the artist’s present interests one series contains the seeds for the next. As Shepherdson puts it, "Snowball is interested in dissemblance—the transfer of an idea as itself to another idea without detection".i It is this method that Snowball has returned to again and again, pushing against the freedom and constraint of the grid. Slack Water forms a compelling visual analogue to Freud’s concept of ‘the oceanic feeling’, an attempt by the non-believer Freud to come to terms, not with religion itself, but an associated feeling of experiential limitlessness.ii Not intended as an explanation of faith, Freud uses the term to describe a (verbally) indescribable feeling, understanding that people experience such a phenomenon despite being unable to experience it himself. Snowball comes closer to describing this feeling than most. His works are beguiling in their execution; hypnotic in their motion (real or implied) and melancholic in their familiarity.
