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| From a white ground - Nicole Ellis, Barbara Halnan at Articulate Upstairs |
Exhibition: Nicole Ellis & Barbara Halnan, From a White Ground
Venue: Articulate Upstairs, 497 Parramatta Rd, Leichhardt
Dates: 2 – 18 August
Catalogue
Essay: Tabula Rasa for two: time and
tempo
If I were to
say to you, or you to me, I come from a
white ground, what would we see in
our minds’ eye? I may see an ancient place where bleached ruins and relics lie
partly buried by shifting white sands. Or snow. You might see shimmering
spectral forms approaching the present from afar, the scene as indistinct as an
overexposed mirage in blinding light. A whiteout. Extremes. Desert heat. Polar
cold. Silence. A place, or space, where the elements of ground and light are
foremost. For visual artists though, the exhibition title’s reference to unmarked
white ground is the classical material beginning. It means a freshly primed
canvas, a crisp sheet of blank paper, a lump of unformed clay, with all the
expansive potential of unexpressed pictorial expression locked into a surface
of blank and impassive whiteness. For a painter a white ground is the first
layer, an underlying source of light and luminosity that can be returned to, to
let light in, during the making of a painting. For a printmaker white is the
negative ground, the space untouched by impression or ink.
A white
ground is also a tabula rasa, the
Latin term literally meaning a scraped
tablet, a used and reused
surface, marked and then scraped back, bearing as history all the incomplete
residues of past messages. This makes it all the more appropriate to describe
the continual development and communication of the abstract visual language common
to the practices of Nicole Ellis and Barbara Halnan. In this joint exhibition From a
White Ground they
present new works, developed separately yet linked by their ongoing dialogue
with white ground. Each set out to investigate the role and meaning of white
ground by allowing it a certain primacy as their works emerged from and engaged
with it. The rasa action, of scraping
back, provides a telling analogy for Ellis’ textile collages on canvas, which
rely more on innate materiality than intervention to convey meaning. In Ellis’
work the white ground appears in two states; the initial white of canvas,
recognisable as every painter’s beginning, but also in the subsequent over
painting in white, which is never solid but is often abraded and in doing so
stands for the passage of time. Conceptually, the philosophical notion of tabula rasa as a blank state of mind
open to the reception of empirical sensation is perhaps more descriptive of
Halnan’s work, based on arithmetic units and patterned sequences of progression,
tone and scale. Each artist explores the concept with rigour and also a certain
austerity such that, when seen together,, the works come From a White Ground in ways that function both as asceticism and
aesthetic.
Ellis’ Light Ground series consists of 6
identically sized rectangular canvasses, each one named and developed around a
particular muted hue; purple, grey, brown, red, gold and pink. Pursuing her longstanding interest in found
colour, found shape and the repurposing of textiles, remnants and offcuts of
manufactured decorator fabrics are laid down in rectilinear constructions and
combined with areas of paint and other markings. The textile pieces and other
elements are placed according to the rectilinearity of a grid, referencing the
historical traditions of concrete and constructivist art. The effect is also to
eschew the movement and dynamism of diagonals in favour of structure and
consolidation, slowing down and pacing the viewing. In Ellis’ work the hand is
restrained in favour of materiality, and what a poignant material story is told.
These carefully salvaged pieces with their scarred and degraded surfaces convey
the passing of time with every overlapping layer of fabric, each partly
obscured design, each echoed pattern, each familiar motif. Like turning the
pages in a book, they build a sense of time and of loss. As many of the designs
are derived from domestic offcuts, the narration deviates into the personal
suggesting once familiar living spaces, curtains and upholstery of recent
memory. Beyond the personal though is the knowledge that textiles have since
ancient times been such rich sources of social history, meaning and making.
In Halnan’s
works, the white ground acts as that clean slate, a renewed and primal state
with forms, structures and patterns rising up from it, establishing and
building the composition up from the ground. There is a sense of orderly and
decisive movement yet, also beneath the purpose, something tentative, as if
testing the stability of ground for the first time. While the titles of
Halnan’s works, Wandering and Meander suggest an equivocal journey;
others like Numbers and Faultline evoke precision and systems.
The rectilinear grid is referenced again, with works where 9 and then 25
individual panels function as discreet elements of a whole square. Within the
square, elements of line, texture and colour riff and repeat the pattern. The
equivocation, like a melody, is contained in the hand drawn lines of graphite
and in the delicate and sparing use of colour, only pale yellow and
silver-grey, like shadow or reflected light. Textures when present are tenuous,
in a barely raised edge, a rippling of surface, soft as sawdust swallowed into
paint. Geometry is very much in play, with motifs repeated, flipped and
reversed. Halnan’s crafting takes these constructions to crisp precision.
Notably, in each work there is some element of relief; either within the work itself
or between the work and the wall. This modelling, lightly done invites the
viewer to perceive actual space within the work, and so creates a lifting off
from white ground, a lightness.
If we were
to walk on white ground through that bleached and ancient place we first
imagined, visibility would be reduced and other senses heightened. Similarly,
the priority given to the role of white by Ellis and Halnan in this exhibition
enables other formal elements and long held interests in their practices to
come to the fore. If white is about beginnings, a new page and a freshly
scraped wax tablet then Halnan’s work, based so fluently on rhythm, scale and
order rises from it like a piece of music. And if that was a beginning, then
Ellis’ work with its pieced layers of loss and erasure is evocative of endings,
of the action of time and memory having passed over, leaving only material
traces.
Lisa Sharp
July 2019
Odds and Evens 2019
Acrylic paint and graphite mounted on wooden blocks
25 canvas boards, each 15 x 15 cm, grid 5 x 5
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Meander 2018-19
Acrylic paint and silver pigment with overlays
3 MDF panels, each panel 35 x 25 cm
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Faultline 2019
Acrylic paint on MDF
7 wooden panels, each 100 cm long with graduated widths
-22/17/12/5 cm
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Wandering 2019
Acrylic paint
with applied texture and collage
9 plywood
panels, each panel 21 x 21 cm
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Nicole Ellis
Light Ground (brown) 2018
Fabric and acrylic paint on canvas
76.5 x 56.5 cm
Nicole Ellis
Light Ground (red) 2019
Fabric and acrylic paint on canvas
76.5 x 56.5 cm
Installation shots Articulate Upstairs - Nicole Ellis, Barbara Halnan - August 2019
Thanks to Sue Blackburn for the photographs.
