SHIPWRECKED FROM A DESERT ISLAND
Arryn and I often talk about art. The matter, being and the stuff of it. The push and pull, the surface and depth, and the joy and madness. It’s messy talk. We also talk about life. The fun stuff and the hard stuff. Loneliness, love, boredom and overstimulation. Arryn talks a lot about light. The differences in the light of Berlin, where he resides, and Australia, his home. This is magical talk because in these moments he transcends the ocean that separates him from here.
Australia is an island. Growing up and living on the east coast means the Pacific Ocean has been constant for Arryn. He yearns for the ocean; to swim, to fish, and to disappear into. In comparison, Berlin is landlocked, so when the city recently came out of an intense period of pandemic lockdown Arryn sought out the nearest thing to an ocean experience. An old housemate had left a blow-up dinghy in the basement of Arryn’s apartment block. Folded into an IKEA bag and worn as a backpack, he and fellow artist (and expat Australian), Stephen Russell, bicycled their way to the nearest lake, inflated the vessel, and set sail with a BBQ chicken and a six-pack of beer.
It is both surprising and unsurprising that Arryn has made Slack Water—a work about the Pacific Ocean. Arryn’s prior works, particularly his large paintings in oil on canvas, are conversations with modernism and the everyday. The monochromatic images respond to common phenomena such as steam rising from a kettle, the breeze blowing sheets on a line, and shadows dancing with inanimate objects. They are austere and restrained. Their smooth and complex surfaces are the result of patience, precision and time. By comparison, Slack Water is loose and full of colour. For four years, Arryn has worked out of a series of poems by the poet, Nathan Shepherdson. Arryn and Nathan talked about making work about the ocean, but as the ocean is big and complex, they chose Grants Guide to Fishes as a place to start. Nathan
created 77 poems from the Guides 900 pages, each poem made from the words found in the text on a single fish. Like the ocean, the poems are expansive, visceral and contain their own surreal logic.
Arryn’s first response to the poems was to paint them. In black tempera on hundreds of pages of warm white paper, Arryn painted fragments of phrases, lines and words from the poems.
It was direct, and he approached the text in a similar way to how Nathan had constructed the poems. Arryn became obsessively interested in the rhythm and pattern created by the negative and positive shapes in the letters. These experiments in text, shape and pattern came together to form Slack Water Mammoth (2017-ongoing). Pinned directly to the wall and endlessly reconfigurable, the work is the ground from which the further Slack Water works have emerged.i
The quality of line in the Slack Water works is different to Arryn’s earlier paintings. Their hand-painted edge, complete with trembles and wavers, is a result of the openness of the process whereby the line or shape is not predetermined, rather, it emerges out of and through the process. I’m reminded of Tim Ingold when he says that art “is a question not of imposing preconceived forms on inert matter but of intervening in the fields of force and currents of material wherein forms are generated”.
Arryn continued to explore the poems and patterns as individual paintings on canvas at a larger scale and introduced colour. He began with chromatic greys but found himself chasing ‘magic grey’, a colour he associates “with air, with atmosphere, with reflection”ii This pursuit, along with the many references to colour in the poems, encouraged Arryn to work in colour.
When he began Slack Water, Arryn also started compounding paints from raw pigments and binders. The process presented him with endless
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possibilities and a desire to document his discoveries through complex colour studies and notations.
These experiments in colour continued in tandem as new paintings on canvas and paper emerged. The paintings begin with a grid, or a net, through which line and colour are layered until a painting emerges. These works contemplate the relationship between surface, colour and abstraction.
Arryn says that “paintings are vessels for meaning, like a bowl they want to fill up with things, no matter how much you empty them out. It seems the emptier a painting is, the greater the size of the metaphors that come to rest in it”iii Perhaps empty paintings have much in common with the surface of the ocean; for the most part it is just light and movement, but the depths promise metaphor and meaning.
The peculiarity of physics in both the physical world and in the process of painting has been a constant for Arryn. His work has always been iterative, oscillating between contained and expansive structures where ideas and process feed each other until they both fall apart. Slack Water had its beginning (and will likely find its end) in the magic of light, movement and surface.
http://www.nicholasthompsongallery.com.au/wp-content/uploads/Slack-Water-Process-Notes-Arryn-Snowball-2018.pdf
iii Ibid, 22.
Megan Williams
i Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (London: Routledge, 2011), 211.
Arryn Snowball, Slack Water: Process notes (Melbourne: Nicholas Thompson Gallery, 2018), 18.
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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
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
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.
Not intended as an explanation of faith,
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Slack Water attempts to make sense of the chaotic state of the world yet reassures us that there is beauty and meaning in this cacophony of suffering, mass extinction and pestilence. This is achieved only through the careful consideration of the tensions of image-making and philosophical problem-solving. Since moving to Berlin, Snowball’s extended, sometimes painful periods of introspection and scrutiny have grown into the artist’s cyclical creative process. The German seasons could not be more different from those of Australia, and in particular, the Berlin winter has integrated itself as a period of enforced existentialism that eventually yields incredible beauty.
The beautiful is just political order lived out on the body, the way it strikes the eye and stirs the heart.
If it is inexplicable, beyond all rational debate, it is because our fellowship with others is likewise beyond all reason, as gloriously pointless as a poem […] like the work of art, it is immune from all rational analysis, and so from all rational criticism.iii
Slack Water is not created in conversation with rational thought, being far more instinctive and evocative in both formal and non-objective terms. Unlike many artists in the world today, you will rarely see anything but Snowball’s best. The rest is usually destroyed, so the filler—the almost-good-enough or the B-sides— that bulk up most artist’s oeuvres won’t exist for long. Snowball’s water studies, which were borne of a period of intense experimentation and rigorous self-censorship, are iterative responses to the limitless physics of water, rather than literal translations of form. These codified and repetitive geometric patterns and colour sequences, usually executed in gouache, have themselves formed a bridge between Slack Water and Snowball’s preceding series Spinning in the pull of absent things (2014), Continuum (2014 – 2015), House of breath (2014-2016) and Contradance (2017), all of which were grounded with set parameters within which to work. While Contradance and House of breath could be considered progressions of previous bodies of work, Continuum and Spinning in the pull of absent things both suggested a rupture from the order and calm of work immediately prior, incorporating a sense of improvisation, even within its internal structure. Each work is a small speciation, and like Mammoth, forms a
greater and adaptable whole.
Considering Snowball’s extended residence in Berlin, his chalk drawings cannot help but evoke the staring, inquisitive ghost of Joseph Beuys, who himself was a restless draftsman, often using drawing as an extension of his angular and farreaching thought processes. Says Beuys:
Certain questions—about art, about science— interest me, and I feel I can go farther toward answering them by trying to develop a language on paper, a language to stimulate more searching discussion […] I try to go beyond these things—I ask questions, I put forms of language on paper, I also put forms of sensibility, intention and idea on paper, all in order to stimulate thought.iv
The parallels, however, do extend beyond chalk drawings, somewhat of a signature of Beuys’, into the consideration of representation and non-objectivity. Consider Sculptures (1954), two pencil and watercolour drawings on paper that invoke sculpture with just the merest evocation, forming with it a variant of a tone poem. One in particular, with its crisscrossing forms, is a distant relative of Snowball’s monochrome video work, Slow dance (2011), a work that itself evokes sculpture purely through shadow and movement. Another watercolour work by Beuys from the same period, Two red fish (1954), bears a poetic resemblance to the poetry at play in Slack Water. Just as some of the Slack Water works are derived from Snowball’s chalk drawings, others are derived from Mammoth. As the artist explains in his process notes, I became interested in the way that the shapes of the letters directed movement across the surface of the canvas. To explore this further, I started painting simple patterns on paper in a similar method to the way I painted the text. I divided the surface with lines, vertical, horizontal and diagonal, and then filled in the shapes as I chose. Sometimes following a pattern, but often breaking it as well. When hung together in a grid, the patterns swell and dance with the eye across the surface. Perhaps in a way that is similar to light glinting on the surface of the water ... This work became the basis for the abstract paintings.v
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While it is convenient (particularly for this essay) to refer to Snowball’s various series, it is a credit to the artist’s instincts how cohesive the last two decades of work has been. That is not to say repetitive—far from it—rather, the artist is a relentless experimenter, working ceaselessly within self-determined frameworks that are never chosen arbitrarily. Returning to Slack Water, Snowball says, Although rarely mentioned, for me, the most powerful image overall is the ocean. It takes me back to fishing on the coast as a kid; disappearing into the colour of the water, the sky, the light, the movement of the tides, the great complexity of the ocean, its power and mystery. For me the ocean is still in the realm of the great unknown, it is what I miss most while living in Berlin.vi
In this way, the ocean serves as a symbol for thought, peace and expression for the artist; a psychic arcology to draw upon, and fall back to, for the exploration of ideas. Considering the industrial bone structures of landlocked Berlin, this makes a lot of sense and only grows more emotional resonance when considering the recent complications and restrictions of international travel. Having lived and worked in Berlin for the last several years, semi-regular stays in Australia have become a necessary exercise for the artist, a chance to recalibrate and refresh. In many ways, the emotions, poetry and even the existence of the Slack Water works reflect this necessity. The irony is not lost on Snowball that his return for the moment is unlikely, however, it is appropriate that the exhibition feature in both North
Queensland and South East Queensland, two parts of Australia the artist has spent significant parts of his life.
This problem of impossible (impassable?) distance offers an interesting obstacle in terms of the chalk drawings, which the artist was to do himself on the black walls of Pinnacles Gallery. Instead, Snowball plans to create instructions for their execution ala Sol LeWitt, an interesting wrinkle in the story of the exhibition, which had itself already been delayed once due to the significant overhaul of programming made necessary by Townsville’s 2019 monsoon, which caused one of the largest floods in the region’s history forcing the Gallery to close for over a year.
The ocean doesn’t want me today
But I’ll be back tomorrow to play
And the strangels will take me
Deep down in their brine
The mischievous braingels
Down into the endless blue wine
I’ll open my head and let out
All of my time vii
Like the connections that creeks and rivers make between the land and the sea, Slack Water draws together different strands of practice, weaving them into an exhibition with shimmering, cresting moments of reflective beauty in response to a deep and universal sense of unrest.
Jonathan McBurnie
ii
iii
iv
v
vi Ibid, 4.
vii
i Nathan Shepherdson, “The Importance of the Square,” in Arryn Snowball: New Works (Brisbane: Arryn Snowball and Heiser Gallery, 2007), 19.
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, translated by Joan Riviere, (New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1930), 8.
Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 1990), 38.
Joseph Beuys, quoted in Anne Seymour, “The Drawings of Joseph Beuys,” in Joseph Beuys: Drawings (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1983), 8.
Arryn Snowball, “Slack Water process notes” (unpublished, 2018), 12.
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Tom Waits, section from “The Ocean Doesn’t Want Me”, Bone Machine (Island Records, 1992).
Rare Sun [detail], 2021, watercolour on paper, 24 x 17 cm each
TWO MEN WORK THREE LINES
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
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‘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 ←)?
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Ankle Deep , 2018, tempera and oil on linen, 120 x 90cm
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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the weight of public usage leaves me little room to manoeuvre
for myself, i will not quickly forget myself, will not quickly forget i was anchored behind the tide, howling at Easter
for myself, i disagreed, saying that i was a fish i had yet to meet
broken free; we moved away from shelter
as the bottom dropped out of the echo we had two strikes
i in one – my companion monstered when everything was carried away – whether by or whatever, we’ll never know
and no-one was more grateful than i to turn out these scattered spots, to show the divided lateral line unique to the shark-like smell present when the present is gutted
the body comes away in sheets upon handling
Nathan Shepherdson
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Moon Spill , 2019, tempera and oil on linen, 190 x 190 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.
i have had the privilege of seeing dawn and dusk bite through daylight hours
trolling beneath the crowd i prefer using three lines –one short and shallow, the second deeper, and the third deepest and longest
their number increases deeply incurved straight-edged and willingly much smaller
this fashion is leaving the water, chilled upon capture, and left beneath damp sacking
the great jaws open to form a diamond-shaped box
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Nathan Shepherdson
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Square Sun , 2019, tempera and oil on linen, 190 x 190 cm
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its severity is out of all proportion to the size of the wound
the immersion of the hand in hot water and ammonia does not bring relief
the body may darken and lighten alternately a close-set pattern can flush and wane the pain moving up my coastline
i well remember vanishing within two seconds
Nathan Shepherdson
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Moon up moon down , 2019, tempera and oil on linen, 190 x 190 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.
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Slack Water Mammoth , tempera on paper, Werkhalle Weisenburg, Berlin, 2021
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403 with two anchors as close as possible to the submerged him
two men work three lines in the memory
night glittering on the scales
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Nathan Shepherdson
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Big Numbers , 2020, tempera and oil on linen, 190 x 190 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.
he would spend his life waiting for dead men’s shoes
he shifted across harbours where he remained until spilling over a bed of living construction in steadily-expanding editions of time
he still describes himself as a box unable to gain the measure of acceptance
Nathan Shepherdson
2
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Berlin Desert , 2020, tempera and oil on linen, 190 x 190 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.
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with a changing repertoire of tactics, going deep to circle endlessly, perhaps coming up fast – always on the wrong side of economic importance, thousands are taken, heavy-bodied, towards the great crescentic second
halfway back to the base of the age, in a belief these were separate to the level of the second start, but never beyond it – a feature that alone separates it from live colour, striking the back so deeply blue as to be black
Nathan Shepherdson
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Pink Duck , 2020, tempera and oil on linen, 190 x 190 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.
306 it is uniformly so vivid that the body inclines towards or away from the viewer graceful filaments confer upon the diamond itself
saline glows gold as the body equal black its travelling-companion mirrors lie on their sides
Nathan Shepherdson
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Steadily expanding editions of time , 2021, tempera and oil on linen, 190 x 190 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.
the long strap, and the tiny second, a ridge of hard tissue along the midline, with two others running parallel, one on either side awaiting nightfall; it offers no fight as it is the surface where (if lucky) the line is cut to set it free;
photographers trade on the mystique, by filming wrestling, portraying a false image of risk, portraying a false image, the zebra lays its eggs in horny black rubble
greater examples are rarely seen a sluggish swimmer, its very attractive colour-markings, combined with its docility, make it an excellent subject
Nathan Shepherdson
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In another red body [detail], 2021, tempera and oil on linen, 190 x 190 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.
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Night caught numbers , 2021, tempera and oil on linen, 190 x 190 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.
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Tetraodontoxin , 2021, tempera and oil on linen, 190 x 190 cm. Image courtesy of the artist.
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Arryn Snowball, studio, 2019
01 Moni and Pink Duck and Berlin Desert 2020 Monica Vaslie, during exhibition installation, Berlin 2020
