Something This Way Comes
Australian galleries - Melbourne, 8 MAR 2022 — 26 MAR 2022
From desolation a new beauty can arise. This is the sentiment behind Dianne Fogwell’s new exhibition Something this way comes. Implicit in the title is the belief that, despite the twin catastrophes of major bushfires and COVID that have upended lives and imposed a new way of living on us all, something worthwhile has to come out of it.
A key element to this survey, the major piece Arcadia Lost 2020 is a large-scale work of 8 panels completed in Canberra during that year’s major bushfires which threatened lives and property, devastating Namadgi National Park, also impacting heavily on Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve and other rural lands creating an ecological disaster. Fogwell recalls the turmoil of the scene along with its’ terrible air quality as akin to a war zone, while facing the possibility of losing her studio and treasured contents. Struck by the awfulness of what her work was capturing she also recognised an ornamental and decorative aspect that is very present in this work.
Reflecting the parallel disaster of COVID and its’ limiting effect on the world, the 4 panel Emptying the Nest, also a large-scale panoramic work, was conceived during lockdown. Conveying a situation that is looming and foreboding, Fogwell’s works question whether this is a nexus point, an opportunity for new growth and development. Exploring the proposition that COVID is nature’s way of redefining the landscape, the artist suggests that we need to redefine the way in which humans interact with the environment, re-thinking fertile ground before it becomes a tragedy.
Nature and landscape are very important to Fogwell, who regards these elements as a metaphor for her own life, incorporating connectivity, a sense of struggle, resilience, and through a combination of new and old, ageing. She understands the natural world demands tragic elements to evolve. It germinates, carves out new directions from the destruction, while savouring aspects of beauty from the past. A common theme of her art is endangered or doomed trees, and the Magpies flying over the Canberra territory that have subsequently become refugees. The telling imagery acknowledges and respects their previous existence and places them into a new story.
From an art practice point of view, these latest works maintain a departure from the intaglio printmaking process to the reverse nature of the linocut. Responding to working in relief and visualising negative imagery, Fogwell has met the challenge by layering her pictorial structure and orchestrating a dialogue between the components using high-key colour harmonies. She describes intaglio as having an emphasis on the edge of the image in contrast to a sense of infinity she finds in the relief print. The artist revels in the frameless nature of the new approach, creating intricate, filigree patterns of detail in nature’s arboreal form.
Later works in this exhibition have, for the first time, begun to incorporate water into the landscape, printed like long unfolding scrolls, reflecting the great ability nature has to recover after long periods of desolation. Exploring the presence of new life force and regeneration after a long period of gestation, Fogwell has taken inspiration from the transformation possible around locations such as Lake Eyre to describe the emergence from arid drought to a world that displays survivors in abundance, and evidence of nature’s paths meeting. The optimism injected by this element parallels the refreshment of drought breaking rain and provides some hope for a progression from a seemingly endless cycle of natural disaster.
Caroline Field
Writer and Curator
