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,

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

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