JOSHUA YELDHAM HAWKESBURY RIVER - DEATH BIRD SERIES SCOTT LIVESEY GALLERIES
909A HIGH STREET ARMADALE 3143
VICTORIA
AUSTRALIA
TELEPHONE + 61 3 9824 7770 FACSIMILE
+ 61 3 9824 7771
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HAWKESBURY RIVER - DEATH BIRD SERIES Invited onboard his ‘spirit vessel’ to travel with him upriver, Joshua Yeldham takes us on an intimate journey along the Hawkesbury, into his inner world of prayers and secret offerings. As much a passage through time as in consciousness, this new work draws its energy from the fresh and vital connectivity of water. The stark seclusion of the desert is replaced by the thriving kinship of the river. With bird-guides in tow, we are passengers and spectators privy to a kind of sacred theatre, set within the watery domain of an attentive, poetic adventurer. In search of blessings and hidden powers, this river has become his personal source of ancient knowledge and a living connection to the natural world. Yeldham’s work is animated, almost shamanistic in its intentions, promising to cure dislocation and find hope in a tangible sense of place. His visual ‘cycle play’ engages eternal themes of life and death, change and constancy, darkness and light, accessed through a process of private contemplation. Referencing fertility rites and devotional ceremonies inspired by Eastern mystical traditions, this artist articulates an ongoing metaphoric dialogue with the forces of nature, allowing us to experience art as a cleansing process, using a poignant form of visual eloquence to which we can relate. From ground level, flying overhead, even underwater to catch a glimpse of nature’s churning wheels, we see a palimpsest of imagery reflecting the spirit of this spectacular coastal country and its shadowy prima materia; where a generous river runs and snakes. Gum trees flex their sinuous limbs and optimistic mangroves send out sentinel roots into the light. Yeldham imagines plant shoots as lovers cradling, oyster plots as welcoming uterine beds and birds as spirit guides. We see amoebas, seedlings, placentas, embryos in their amniotic oases, water nymphs; a myriad of forms flourishing in these individual experiments in renewal and growth. Narration of these images, and his active efforts to cultivate their interconnecting meanings, ensures this ‘waterman’ is harvesting as directly as the oyster farmers themselves. His figures overlap, shapes unfold, fragment and intersect in continuous succession. The result is a series of beautifully rhythmic, idealized lines stitched onto interchangeable colour planes; deep Prussian blue for the lower river, burnt umber for the murky upper regions. All of which seems to defy the elusiveness of time and insist on the fleeting miracle of synchronicity. Instead of winged omens of death, as lamented in the 1928 ‘Death Bird of Colo River’ legend, Yeldham’s birds foretell the mysterious cycles of life and rebirth. As navigational beacons, their stares portend not doom, but nature’s inexorable wisdom and the artist channels their secrets into his river tales. His paintings are studies in meditation from the porthole of awareness, opening onto a panorama of inner culture. As splendid topographic illustrations, they are quite literally stories; each arising from the metabolised, communicative energy of an artist as translator, capturing thought in one medium to free its potential in another. This continuum of line work is applied like tapestry, paralleling the depth of field found in nature’s details.
Yeldham follows a great tradition of artists and explorers lured by the raw power of nature. More than a passionate witness, he is entirely immersed in the landscape, receptive and interactive. From within the belly of this river, he loses all sense of time and its waterholes of living art provide the necessary refuge and grounding. In the artist’s words: “I camp out on the river for days, carving, sitting, meditating in the stillness. Working with a simple drill and a limited palate of colours, characters emerge from the shimmering water. Mark-making links me to time, sorrow and joy; it strips me down to what I have inside. Colouring, spiralling, filling that space, I finally grasp its meaning…and there is a fearless element to it, a love of the death and detachment that drives me to work an image into something else.” Landscape here becomes the very medium for expression and its truest goals are realised introspectively; making contact with a transcendental self from which both artist and viewer may regain a sense of sacredness despite the surrounding secularised world. He is simultaneously focused on microcosmic details, such as the leaf venation of the lilies at House Boat Bay, and a macrocosmic perspective like the geography of Portland Reach. Created from memory, there is a shifting of foreground and background defining his vision of the oneness and reciprocity of reality. His templates from nature’s book of knowledge are etched on clay boards, like transcripts of fading memories, with pictorial phrases that run into each other in a free flowing exercise. Yeldham’s visual style, in its fluidity and concerns, is associative to the masters of the modern landscape, Aboriginal dot painting and ancient calligraphy, his textile-anatomy of expression, essentially an unfolding of oneself. His sculptures and jigsaw panel carvings, depicting mud crabs, water currents, rock surfaces, animals, even energy lines, are as much his visual poetry as a commentary on the fragility and tenacity of life itself. The carved tree trunks in his ‘studio forest’ continue their indigenous story in the hands of this artist and emerge as the ultimate feminine archetypes in an eternal symmetry of sensuality. Ultimately, Yeldham is concerned with chronicling that freedom from time and space that makes way for a new birth of self, where obstacles, limitations, and fears begin to die in the fabric that wends its way through the stories of our lives. Tracing emotional landscapes with any precision requires a particular sensitivity to the joys and struggles of the human condition. To see them mirrored in the very environment which surrounds us is to enjoy a rare and heightened communion with one and the other. Yeldham’s art contains the kind of narrative that invites reflection and provides the very pretext for the stillness required to achieve it. Profound and intense personal experiences engender the development of a spiritual context to his painting, enlivened by a virtual documentary of personal prayers, as much as by an empathetic eye for colour, texture and form; always with deliberate, meditational devotion. Rosa Maria Falvo, August 2007
1 Lillies – House Boat Bay 91.5 x 61 cm Shellac and oil on carved board Signed ‘Yeldham’ lower right
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2 Oyster Leases - Two Dollar Bay 92 x 106 cm Shellac and oil on six carved boards Signed ‘Yeldham’ lower right
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3 Death Bird – Bedlam Creek 112 x 91.5 cm Shellac, oil and carved board assemblage Signed ‘Yeldham’ lower right
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4 Hawkesbury River – Portland Reach 91.5 x 122 cm Shellac and oil on carved board Signed ‘Yeldham’ lower right
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5 Oyster Leases – Iron Bark Creek 122 x 92 cm Oil on carved board and wood assemblage Signed ‘Yeldham’ lower right
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6 Snake Island 46 x 71 cm Oil on two carved boards Signed ‘Yeldham’ lower right
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7 Mangrove Tree – Morning Bay 122 x 91.5 cm Shellac, oil and wood on carved board Signed ‘Yeldham’ lower right
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8 Owl of Morning Bay 194 x 66 x 60 cm Acrylic, oil and wood on Australian red cedar Signed ‘Yeldham’ lower right
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9 Ant Nest Point 46 x 61 cm Shellac and oil on carved board Signed ‘Yeldham’ lower right
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10 Jumping into Blue 118 x 102 cm Shellac with carving to French handmade paper Signed ‘Yeldham’ lower right
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11 Cotton Tree Bay 122 x 91.5 cm Shellac and oil on carved board Signed ‘Yeldham’ lower right
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12 Fertility Tree – Mud Island 107 x 199 cm Shellac and oil with carving to French handmade paper Signed ‘Yeldham’ lower right
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13 Hangman’s Rock 91.5 x 122 cm Shellac and oil on carved board Signed ‘Yeldham’ lower right
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14 Fertility Owl 184 x 122 cm Oil and wood on two carved boards Signed ‘Yeldham’ lower right
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15 Cattai Creek 91.5 x 122 cm Shellac and oil on carved board Signed ‘Yeldham’ lower right
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16 Cowan Creek 184 x 244 cm Oil on four carved boards Signed ‘Yeldham’ lower right
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FOLD OUT
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17 Fertility Boat 103 x 85 x 240 cm Carved board, rope, convict nails and resin on carved timber boat Signed ‘Yeldham’ on base of boat
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18 Spirit of a Young Girl – Oyster Leases 122 x 184 cm Oil and wood on two carved boards Signed ‘Yeldham’ lower right
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19 Bird Island 182 x 183 cm Oil and wood on four carved boards Signed ‘Yeldham’ lower right
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20 Morning Bay 250 x 85 x 63 cm Acrylic, oil and wood on Australian red cedar Signed ‘Yeldham’ lower right
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21 Bell Bird – Mud Island 91.5 x 122 cm Shellac and oil on two carved boards Signed ‘Yeldham’ lower right
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22 Mother’s Milk – Morning Bay 120 x 120 cm Oil on two carved boards Signed ‘Yeldham’ lower right
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23 Blue Summer 122 x 184 cm Oil on two carved boards Signed ‘Yeldham’ lower right
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24 Colo Bird – Morning Bay 184 x 122 cm Oil on two carved boards Signed ‘Yeldham’ lower right
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25 Blue Moon – Oyster Leases 122 x 184 cm Oil on two carved boards Signed ‘Yeldham’ lower right
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26 Oyster Leases – Hawkesbury River 184 x 122 cm Oil and wood on two carved boards Signed ‘Yeldham’ lower right
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27 Mangrove Creek 1,2 & 3 (Tryptich) 91.5 x 122 cm Oil and wood on three carved boards Signed ‘Yeldham’ lower right
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28 Blue Bird – Colo River 182 x 120 cm Oil and wood on carved board assemblage Signed ‘Yeldham’ lower right
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29 Summer Storm – Oyster Leases 204 x 269 cm Oil and wood on four carved panels Signed ‘Yeldham’ lower right
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30 View from the Boat – Morning Bay 118 x 102 cm Shellac with carving to French handmade paper Signed ‘Yeldham’ lower right
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Rod Eastgate Rosa Maria Falvo Jacqueline Fraser Paul Green Ted O’Donnell Aster Colour Printing
Catalogue complied by Scott Livesey & Jessica Williams ISBN 978 0 9756873 7 6