Nathan Shepherdson

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Below, the waters leaf through the bibles, and the compass needle points to night. Out of dreams the gold is sifted and the sea inherits what remains.i

Ingeborg Bachmann

Slack Water. The tidal point at which our planetary water mass greets its opposite purpose as dictated by the moon. Through gravity, the oceans, seas, and rivers take two submerged breaths a day. The 71% that measures itself, not with ‘coffee spoons’ but with eons of oxygenated blue in its own eye. We are detail, a drill down from the immense to the particular — the dot on the i the poet’s head, the head of the reader, or the head of the artist. Poetry draws its own doors to walk through, doesn’t bother to count its steps as the same door disappears, as thoughts measure the distance to the next wall. It’s been my habit for almost twenty years to reserve space on the ‘next wall’ for Arryn Snowball’s work. Our friendship is as much a collaboration as the work we produce. In the conversational drift of a project, we become truffle hunters in the subconscious, friendship to the fore, egos aside, taking turns in being hunter or dog. In October 2017, I went to see Arryn’s Square Sun exhibition at Nancy Sever Gallery in Canberra. The show knitted intersecting paths, paintings from his House of breath (2014–16) and Continuum (2014–15) series, plus a return to ‘word’ paintings. Loose, free, jazz surfaces that ask the viewer to go with it, to destabilise thoughts and self in the nourishment of egg tempera transparency. Arryn said he’d been “nicking” bits from my poems, jostling the context into a muzzle of shapes, sifting words to surface in a concrète consommé where (perhaps), the eggshells absorb the impurities. After viewing his show, we visit the National Botanical Gardens. We roll down a grass embankment. Queasy aftershocks ensue. Arryn asks if I’d like to do “another project”, “something big”, “not sure what”. The one seed in two heads, we drove away from the Garden. A few weeks later Arryn calls me from a boat in North Queensland. He tells me he’s been asked to do a four-week residency at the Museum of Brisbane (MoB) — maybe we can work that into our undefined project? I suppose because he was fishing, I mentioned how I’d used a few snippets from Grant’s Guide to Fishes in writing a commissioned poem.ii That poem was triggered by an article about game-hunter Vic Hislop supplying Damien Hirst with a pair of tiger sharks. Simpatico bird on shoulder, Arryn said, “Grant’s Guide is right here in front of me, on the boat.” So began another ode to happenstance. While the residency was good news, a month is not a long time to produce a series of poems and paintings (the latter to be showcased at City Hall). When he returned to Brisbane, we met for coffee, Grant’s Guide in hand. We randomly opened it at page 436 where Ern Grant’s phrase “on slack water” jumped out. We agreed I should use a found poetry technique, seeing this as the only way to produce a swag of poems within such a short timeframe. I settled on 77 poems as the number, simply because it’s Arryn’s year of birth. My constraint was to choose one fish for each poem with its page number becoming the title. Throughout the Guide two constants appeared — the words ‘line’ and ‘surface’ — respective philosophical materials for poet and painter. Thinking back, it was a matter of channelling imaginative blood pressure into improvised panic. No time to stop and look at what was being produced. Chance used as the lure. In many instances, I chose fish based on personal association: a Mangrove Jack for me, Moses Perch for my mother, Queenfish for my brother, Spanish Mackerel for my father, and so forth. With other poems, I just treated the book as an irregular die with over 800 pages. As the poems took shape, the metaphoric ‘else’ we hoped for commenced its construction. Writing the poems by drawing from what was identified allowed what was unidentified to form into transient shoals that seeped out of the cold blood of their subject. Aloud, the poems sound

‘normal’ — dead-pan, newsreader in tone — but they devised their own context, presenting their strange evidence as riddles scrawled in blurred momentum. The poems could be about, or at least represent, a multitude of things: art, nature, language, humans, narrative, philosophy, energy, or theory. I fed the poems to Arryn in batches. Arryn began working up A3 sheets of cream Römerturm paper with splices of text, moving them around, manipulating flat blocks into what would become the open-ended, transformative mosaic known as Mammoth (2017– ongoing).iii Looking into the tank, we soon realised we were in the tank. Behind everything is everything else, and the stars, fish, other animals, and all manner of objects you can dream about are not necessarily yours. Grant’s Guide to Fishes became the central object. We each had a copy, and those copies became thought generators in silent stereo, our hands on either one to impart poetic oaths into and out of its girth. Behind the Guide is Ern Grant himself. His language allowed us access to the crevices and the elasticity required to extract and form tangible ideas, and to interpret (or translate) those ideas into poems and images. In a wry sense, I also enjoyed the association with the ‘other’ Erniv in Australian poetry, even the alignment with the poetic method used. In a nutshell, Ern Grant had been through the war, was posted in New Guinea, was offered a tertiary education (for returned servicemen), chose marine biology, worked for the Queensland Department of Harbours and Marine, where he produced early editions of the Guide.v After his retirement, he was given permission to keep expanding the Guide into new editions as a private venture until its final incarnation in 2014 – the edition Arryn and I used for the Slack Water project. Ern is a scientist, yes, but his anecdotal writing style eddied and pooled in a way that we could peer into. I grew up with two earlier editions of the Guide in the house. The Guide seemed a constant presence, regularly cutting a profile on either the kitchen or dining table. The idea that poetry written in 2017 can find purpose within tunnelled memory decades old is particularly rewarding. Indistinguishable from those memories are my father Gordon and my brother Luke, both possessing angling knowledge on an old-world scale. Both capable of reading, listening, and translating water into language. Clearly Ern Grant was privy to that language. Ern was born in 1924, Gordon in 1934, both possessing uninflated wisdom particular to their generation at its best. Gordon died in 2019. I did get to talk a little about Slack Water with him and to read him a handful of poems in the nursing home. Fishing invents its own clock. Its tidal-time, combined with its movements of casting, standing, and reeling, make it a kind of martial art of observation, dependent on skill, patience and reflex. Memory allows me to visit places and beings that no longer exist; the half-mile jetty at Cleveland; or my father’s living self. From a four-week residency in 2017, Arryn is nearing four years at work on Slack Water. He’s doing all the work these days of course, but it still provides us with rotisserie conversations, letters, words, images, shapes, lines, notions, and concepts, all delivered to themselves and back again. With its history, we agree that it’s essentially a work of and in perpetual translation – we translate it, it translates us.

In August 2018, looking for a definition of some sort, I suggested via an email it was, “poems made using words about fish, that feed into paintings of words made from poems made from words about fish”. Although, the word ‘fish’ is only used once in the sequence, and by now the paintings have moved well beyond the depiction of words. In writing the poems I imagined Arryn would create textbased works, either black and white, or at least grey and monochromatic. From poet to passenger, the ride has been mysterious and profound. The 2017 residency did produce four paintings, text-based, now in the Museum of Brisbane Collection.vi However, most of the work in the series has been painted in Berlin, with works shipped back rolled, then re-stretched for shows in Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, and Brisbane. Arryn’s text paintings pulled the poems out of their lower-case selves into upper-case imagery. The letters and words amplify, evolve through geometry into shapes and signifiers that ask to be read, and in their alternate way, offer to read the thoughts of the viewer. In speculating on their physical creation, I’m really

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skimming punctuated stones over Arryn’s private ocean. His own writings on the series offer up intricately layered insights. He introduced masterful solutions in his paintings – crescents, squares, windows, ovals, all obeying the ancestral shapes within language. These shapes rotate, recede, emit, then repeat their patterns back into language as hand-derived code. Although the poems and paintings are of and from each other, the works must also be complete in a singular sense, must be able to stand alone without assistance. When I talk about Arryn’s process, about his tactile conversion therapy from poem to painting, I tell people as my prime example, “look at the K, look at the K”. Specifically, pay attention to its two-sided equilateral, a voice, a flattened cone, a ‘less than’ (<) intent on subjecting reduction to addition as an aesthetic multiplier. The ghost of K is ever present. It multiplies, like a diagram for an unfolding poly-sided crystal in the recent 190cm squares Arryn nicknames his ‘net’ paintings. What do they catch? Are they handmade apparatuses used to harvest homeless thought? Or safehouses for shadows with a lisp? Triangles are the dominant type. They do seem vocal, caught in or diverting currents, Mary Celeste-like flotillas, or Pythagorean sea burials. Caught in hallucinatory maths, they bob and congeal from the true liquid of paint, pigment-rich, to ease their presence as freeze-frames, oceanic surfaces in the vertical, where they achieve immunity to tides (perhaps), having ceased to be recordable fluency, but still fluent as ideas nonetheless. The other major surprise in the Slack Water series has been Arryn’s use of colour. For 15 years prior, his work had predominantly been black and white; (ok, yes, shaded grey, consequential grey, and umber, apologies to umber, I know you’re in there). The poems contain numerous references and name-checks to colour. The Guide, The Descriptive Science, The Reef - an inevitable three-cornered pact that plays its part inside a system of colour wheels fueled by Arryn’s version of the sun remembered from Berlin. In writing the poems, I was attracted to the premise of the word ‘red’ being painted in black and white, or ‘blue’ being painted in black and white. Within the poems themselves, of course, the words ‘red’ and ‘blue’ are black and white. It seems the actual colours, as nouns, decided to impose their literal selves into the paintings. At one stage, Arryn asked if I was subliminally goading him into using colour, based on the constant colour ticks and reiterations, but this was not the case. In recent months, Arryn has produced dozens of smaller watercolours, grouped under the title Rare Sun (2021– ongoing). He remains in Berlin but is suffering from a vitamin deficiency of Queensland light. These works seem, and perhaps are referencing, early 20th-century abstraction. Is this European art history borrowing the ocular nerves of a mid-career Australian artist to look through his memory at something IT never saw? As an exercise, compare a reef fish photograph in the Guide to a Rare Sun sequence. Water colour startles as fact, as the medium transmutes to a medium. It’s a safe bet Malevich did not see a Wrasse or a Red Emperor. How does it end? I felt the ‘net’ paintings may have been the concluding works. Big, magic squares for contemplation. Arryn visualising them in situ (with a pinch of self-mockery), in his Fish Chapel (call for Mr Rothko on line one), accompanied with the ‘stained glass’ of the Rare Sun designs as a Slack Water splinter group. I’m not sure how it ends. The Guide is also known as the Fisherman’s Bible. In my own bible is uncertainty, words always dissolve when I look at them, yet desist their dissolution when I look away. I’m the wrong guy to ask at the right time. There is a part of Arryn’s practice that gives a sympathetic nod to painters such as On Kawara or Roman Opalka and their obsessive commitment to the unending. Colin McCahon is a spiritual uncle too. McCahon and Snowball — not the immediate choices for a tuxedo until you remember to think in black and white. Given that Slack Water started here (→ Brisbane), is it refusing to end there (Berlin ←)?

Ankle Deep, 2018, tempera and oil on linen, 120 x 90cm

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Do three question marks add up to one (time ↔ ???) Another perceptual oddity — for all our adherences and allusions to time, language, and abstraction — is just how local Slack Water’s derivation is. Queensland painter, Queensland poet, and the Guide written and published in Queensland by a Queensland scientist. Ern Grant himself within horizon’s reach of the kaleidoscopic miracle in Queensland that is the Great Barrier Reef. (Our Pacific selves should become intrinsic passports to its majesty). Yet, most of Slack Water has been created in Berlin. Postcards from the artist to himself in his absence, postcards to his absence, which rhythmically look to develop one colour equation that returns him as himself. The possible not possible unless it’s impossible. What is it that cannot be finished until he returns? Is it Slack Water that cannot be finished until he returns?

Take all colours out of one earth and you have one full stop hanging in space.

sure, the dead are drab in colour but i have watched as black slid under the boat at long gaff’s reach; aroused in a hue that flooded the back; even in being, the neon-like colouration is lost, identified beyond doubt, in form that cannot be folded down, against the body

i have seen how i can fall out of the echo

the immense is not retractable

from 691, Slack Water

Nathan Shepherdson

i Ingeborg Bachmann, “Dead Harbour,” in Days in White poems by Ingeborg Bachmann, translation by Angelika Fremd. (Five Islands Press, Wollongong, 2003), 53. ii Nathan Shepherdson, “from the other side of the shark,” Cordite Poetry Review, guest ed. Felicity Plunkett. 46:0 (2014), http://cordite.org.au/content/poetry/notheme3/ iii Mammoth could be the subject of its own essay. It can be the reef on which Slack Water is built or be viewed as an x-ray revealing the structure of what’s under its surface. It’s a conglomerate. A still storm of words, patterns and possibilities, auto-listing its anthropology in an uninhibited regimen both stark and vivid. One work in hundreds of pieces, it can be shuffled, pinned up, pulled down, packed up (Tillers-like), to be sent and exhibited as an epic example of portable visual efficiency, wherever there is an invitation and a wall big enough. To this time, it has been shown in Brisbane, Townsville, Sydney, Montpellier, Luxembourg, New York, and Berlin. iv Ern Malley 1918–1943. Both poet and poems were created by James McAuley and Harold Stewart as a literary hoax targeted at the Heide group. The poems were constructed from a variety of source materials. They were published in an edition of Angry Penguins titled “The Darkening Epileptic”. A scandal ensued. The debate continues. The poems persist. v In all there have been twelve editions of Grant’s Guide to Fishes. The first edition was in 1965 and was called Fishes of Australia. Over the years, subtle shifts in the title lead to its current form. vi Four titles: Shallow black saddles target and amass points in a puddle and collapse; Slack Water; The great jaws open to form a diamond shaped box dusk and dawn bite through daylight hours three lines one short and shallow the second deeper and the third deepest and longest; This is broken dark and the unbroken dark beneath. All works 2017 and 90 x 120cm.

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