Sojourn Shane Fitzgerald
Notes on Contradiction: Shane Fitzgerald’s Sojourn Townsville is a city of contradictions. Named after a wealthy blackbirder, and by all accounts, a nasty piece of work, the city is also home to a rich and diverse Indigenous community. Eddie Koiki Mabo, easily Townsville’s most venerated and influential adopted son, lived here for decades, researching law and the concept of terra nullius (nobody’s land) in his spare moments, preparing for his gamechanging High Court battle. Townsville is situated in the dry tropics, and yet, the summer positively drips with humidity. The city heaves and pants in the stretches in which it isn’t being buffeted by cyclone or flood. Townsville, as a name for a city, is deeply silly. Its original designation of ‘Castle Town’, as the small settlement that grew at the foot of Castle Hill, is notable in its repudiation in favour of the name of a money-man to whom the town was merely a footnote. ‘Town-town’, people sometimes joke, and of course, Townsville is the fictional city home of the cartoon characters, the Powder Puff Girls. To every smiling, overexposed local sporting hero like Greg Norman or Joi Toi, the city boasts a crew of underrated creatives, intellectuals and
Incongruous landscape II: Monolith, Fujiflex print, 120 x 398cm, 2016, 1/1
thinkers. Could Julian Assange grow up any place else? Perhaps not. Sojourn marks the first solo exhibition in Townsville for artist Shane Fitzgerald exploring these contradictions. Inspired by the specificity of the landscape, these works carry Townsville with them in their fabric, with a visual poetry that is hard to describe. Place is a hugely important aspect of not only art works, but narrative in general. Considering Fitzgerald’s own enthusiasm for film, it is easy to chart a direct influence on artistic process. The environments created for these narratives are often rich and dense, and have a huge effect on the work itself. Imagine Batman without Gotham City, Colonel Kurtz without Cambodia, or Luke Skywalker without Tatooine. Place anchors and gives context, but what of place on its own, stripped of such narrative? Incongruous Landscape II: Monolith is perhaps the most clearly ‘Townsville’ of the exhibition, a triptych echoing the forms of Castle Hill. The work itself is rendered in earthy tones, coarsely textured, and ominous in tone. Fitzgerald likens some of these works to Xavier Herbert’s 1938 novel Capricornia, itself a masterwork in contradiction; Herbert’s straightshot prose doesn’t flinch from describing the brutal colonisation
of the north, but simultaneously offers its Indigenous characters a dignity through independence and personality that is still all too rare in literature. The novel is also a fierce account of the Australian tropics— this is a landscape that mocks the unprepared, and punishes even the slightest weakness in grit or resolve. Before the false categorisation of terra nullius came terrae incognitae; a landmass that was known to exist, through snatches of sightings over decades, and thought to be a huge continental mass that would anchor, or counterweight, that of the north, populated by strange, sometimes horrific creatures, even giants. The continent was, of course, slowly charted and mapped over the years. Strange creatures were found, though nothing as monstrous as first thought; indeed, how monstrous is our strangest, and perhaps most cartoonishly adorable creature, the Platypus? Or, like the so-called Patagonian giants, explained away by some as particularly tall Chilean tribesman, or dismissed as fanciful hoax, and not a Martikhora in sight.
Benthic II: Dusk [detail], Fujiflex print, 110 x 157cm, 2017, 1/1
Incongruous landscape I: Vista [detail], Fujiflex print, 120 x 398cm, 2016, 1/1
Paluma [detail], Fujiflex print, 110 x 308cm, 2014, 1/1
It is no coincidence that the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the time the concept of terra Australis incognita (a more geographically specific reference, by virtue of a cartographic process of elimination, to what was eventually known as Australia) began to take root of the popular imagination, was also a period of sustained visual investigation becoming a part of such navel expeditions. The Spanish, in particular, were early to adopt a policy of bringing along scientific illustrators for such voyages, which eventually became standard practice. Of course, the more thoroughly the globe was mapped, the more terra Australis incognita faded from the territories exclusively devoted to the imagination, and relegated into the harsh concrete world of colonial exploitation. Fitzgerald’s work is akin to the concept of terra Australis incognita in its reimagining of what we know, what we see, into the fantastic. It is at once an invention of process and of the imagination, yet clearly anchored in something that we understand as real. We can feel, from its vivid colours and lush, shimmering humidity that it is of this place, but at the same time it is just out of the grasp of the mind’s eye. Rather than standard, linear cartography, his is a description of a place charted in colour. In Fitzgerald’s hands, the contradictions of this place coalesce in benthic swirls, fugacious rains and ancient, granitine forms. With the mapping of the modern world, the basis for the search of knowledge justified itself in the name of scientific discovery, whereas now, in our allegedly enlightened age, we have a different search. We search for the inner, the other, that indefinable kernel of thought that has gone missing somewhere along the path of illumination and supposed progress. This work expands outwards of the mind in widescreen, only loosely tethered to this crushing reality. Sojourn grasps at that which is evanescent and disembodied, painted and sculpted of light, a temporary stay, a fleeting thing.
Jonathan McBurnie Director, Umbrella Studio contemporary arts
Incendiary II: Incand Ä“ scere, Fujiflex print, 146 x 75cm, 2017, 1/1
Sojourn 14 July - 20 August 2017 Umbrella Studio contemporary arts
Front Cover: Capricornia requiem [detail], Fujiflex print, 120 x 199cm, 2017, 1/1 Open Add Tel Web
Mon-Fri 9-5 / Sat-Sun 9-1 482 Flinders St, Townsville 4772 7109 www.umbrella.org.au
Umbrella Studio acknowledges the financial support of: the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body, and the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments.