Charlie Wells - Forms of Landscape.
Tuggeranong Arts Centre, 137 Reed Street, Greenway. Open weekdays 10am to 7pm, Saturday 10am to 4pm. Until 28 February.
Forms of Landscape is an exhibition about the artist, Charlie Wells's, relationship with and responses to the Australian landscape. The exhibition takes the viewer on a seductive journey, travelling with the artist as she confronts and meditates on the powerful beauty that is our country. Wells ushers the viewer around the light-filled space of the larger of the two upstairs galleries of the Tuggeranong Arts Centre. The installation works particularly well with the mainly "serial" (and logical) hang of the thirty pieces allowing for the quiet contemplation of each work but simultaneously insinuating internal relationships within the various series whilst alluding to the thematic bottom line that gives the overall exhibition meaning as well as aesthetic resonance.
Wells uses a limited, yet very effective palette – essentially browns, creams and yellows, the latter sometimes declaratively in an acid tone. The palette is a major ingredient in its contribution to the ambient character of the exhibition. The colours are those of the landscape and Wells invests them with a soft and intimate tone that is at once personal to her and quietly conveys her emotional attachment to places visited and loved. She makes (relatively) small works that demand close visual inspection and consequent aesthetic engagement. The poetry of intimate confrontation is beautifully celebrated in Forms of Landscape.
The four works from the "Paddock' series begin the viewer's journey. The title of each "Paddock" is related to a centrally placed coloured rectangle – "Yellow Paddock", "Red Paddock", "Green Paddock", "Ochre Paddock". These coloured motifs sit or indeed "float" above fields of lines or (lines of) dots. Each work has thirteen lines, neatly horizontal and clearly evocative of an epistolary format, but here perhaps nature's scripts are transposed to the artist's pictorial vocabulary. Wells's use of repetition is embracingly seductive. The abstract marks or dots in each line evoke aspects of topography. Their overt individualisation secures posts of memory for the artist but posits possibilities for varying interpretations for each viewer.
Formally the central motif contains the slow lateral pull of the linear background. The serial character of the sets of 13 lines underscores the entire exhibition in that it infers the continuity of transactions with nature. While each line is confined to the width of the paper on which it sits, the "possibilities" for eastward extension are always present. Wells however holds this with the floating density of the various centralised rectangles.
The works in the "Landscape Remembered" series are subtly layered conveyors of memories. They continue the warmth of emotional attachment to places seen and loved. In most of the exhibition "place" is not specified. In "Burnt Hill Mullagalah" the nominal title is irrelevant. The landscape becomes a misty evocation of the bush after fire, an allusion to the drama inherent in the cycles of nature. The Fred Williamesque tripartite division of the picture plane is overlaid by, once again, floating motifs (here, leaves) that provide formal spatial depth and illustrations from the natural world. The elision of the natural with the abstract imparts formal and pictorial tension and underscores the artist's insertion of her highly developed aesthetic understanding of her chosen subject-matter.
Wells's making literally embraces the world she pictorializes. Process is intimately entwined with content and is integral to the way Wells visually manifests her philosophical and aesthetic understanding of where she is. Actual physical elements from the places she visualises are embedded into the paper or activate the canvases, literally referencing the landscape she so poetically translates. While this procedural encompassing mostly works, in some instances (eg "Reflections on Dam II" or "Transience") its literalness, its blaring actuality, is arguably best omitted. Suggestion is often a more compelling device than reality.
This is an exhibition that is about reverence and reverie. The artist is clearly in a deep and awe-full relationship with the Australian landscape. Her visual transpositions of that relationship in "Forms of Landscape" propose a unique journey, a journey that poeticises the relationship between artist, artwork and viewer.
