Show Me The Treasure

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Jennifer Blau’s thirteen photos are now up in ‘In Profile’, an exhibition space dedicated to local artists in the foyer of Mosman Art Gallery. If, like me, you haven’t as yet paid attention to this small space, now is the time to check it out, as Blau’s subliminal treat is only up until 2 February 2025.

Between Me and the Sea can be seen as a lucid photographic survey of what Blau describes as the ‘liminal space’ between land and sea, but it is also very much about place and light, the intertidal space acting as a metaphor for the transitions of grief, impermanence and loss. These thirteen photographs are of, or taken from, ‘The Moorings’ Blau’s former family home which is cantilevered over the edge of the rock platform at Chinaman’s Beach. The view is, and will declare here I have seen it, mesmerising. The Moorings is an architectural folly, a piece of history, a boathouse repurposed to domesticity, a look-out point with a precarious tenacity, and a wily subject for Blau’s lens.

Here, we have thirteen photographs that, bar one, have Middle Harbour front, centre and, or, side, some six of these images play with thresholds; windows, doors, the veranda, and the way glass frames and distorts, and, like water, reflects and refracts sun and moon light. The photo image used here is ‘Smashed by Waves’ which gives us the mad washing machine of waves pounding onto the windows just outside the living room — with its implication that perhaps we are just a step away from madness or catastrophe.

Contrast this with ‘Clouds on the Piano’, a whole skyscape limpid and lovely in the lacquered lid of a grand piano that segues into the harbour beyond, showing us, to paraphrase Seamus Heaney ‘the music of what happens’. Blau also gives us a Pantone® range of blue, from pale aquamarine where a teenaged daughter floats, a little like Ophelia, and little like Obelia, through a cobalt glint of glassine, pixelated sea, to a perfect stretch of moonlit midnight blue. Mostly we are with Blau, inside looking out, or down, and with her contemplating in the end, her empty home.

That Blau trained as a photo editor earlier in life is evident in this precise set of a baker’s dozen.

We are shown the garden by the shadows on the front door, and only glimpse the whole place and its solitary perch from what might be the wrong end of the telescope. There is much to attend to in this collection, we are wavering on the edge on consciousness, like the two submerged rails of the old boat ramp going somewhere and at an impasse, we are under the opalescent movement of high tide, and we are balanced between the sea and the shore, past and present.

Photograph Credit: ‘Smashed by Waves’ Copyright, Jennnifer. Blau

Jennifer Blau’s photographic portrait “Forget Me Not’ from her ‘Patricia’s Room’ series, a study of aging and memory loss, was a finalist for the National Photographic Portrait Prize. Her exhibitions include ‘Patricia’s Room’, ‘After Midnight’ and ‘Their Space (Teenage Bedrooms)’. Her ‘The 50 Book: Women. Celebrate Life’ is available directly from the50book.com and Booktopia.

Jennifer Blau’s thirteen photos are now up in ‘In Profile’, an exhibition space dedicated to local artists in the foyer of Mosman Art Gall...

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Emma Fielden, ‘Somewhere between silver and stone,’ 2024, lapis lazuli, oil, silver point and gesso on linen, 60 x 70cm, Photographer: Document Photography

Material Worlds

On Emma Fielden’s ‘Somewhere between Silver and Stone’

Q: What happens when the artist Emma Fielden picks up a paint brush for the first time, having just pulverised a chunk of lapis lazuli? A: ‘Somewhere between Silver and Stone’

Fielden is that paradoxical thing, a conceptual artist who is a materialist, not in the sense that she is a consumer, but that her art materials; ground, smashed, deconstructed, layered, re-applied, sometimes held up by magnetic forces, become, in essence, her work. When she works with sumi ink in a piece like Confluence it is the ink itself that is the Hero, when she starts on The Veil, it is the ink’s capacity to scale down to – well close to zero, the scale being an acute expression of both patience and application. And so, to the painting, ‘Somewhere between Silver and Stone’ Fielden’s first painting, selected for the 2024 Mosman Art Prize, suggests, one hopes, the beginning of a series of painting.

While paintings usually acquire provenance after they have been created, through successive ownership, Fielden manages, by using materials bequeathed to her by the artist Margaret West to create an intrinsic provenance, working with inherited silver point to draw lines over a prepared linen surface of four layers of black gesso, and then by suspending lapiz lazuli, carefully ground, in sunflower oil. Fielden is, literally, working from, and with, scratch.

Lapis Lazuli, both as a precious stone and as word is notable. The compound word from lapis — Latin for stone, and lazulum for blue, this second part with its roots in the Persian‘azure’, combine to give a liquid alliteration, the two parts suggesting a rock of heaven, blue stone, sky blue, azul, azure. Leaving the sea and sky to one side, blue is relatively rare in nature, lapis lazuli has always been a semi-precious jewel and a luxury for painters.

So ‘Somewhere’, with its top strata of ground stone, what we have might be called, fancifully, and here I indulge in romance, a field of heaven. Fielden leaves a bit of grit in her blue powder, so we don’t get that mid-tone blue which we you might remember from the scarf of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, not the serene azure of the Virgin’s robes but a dark night sky blue-black that, if interrogated, glints, specks of scintillation, a surface that changes with the ambient lighting and the viewer’s angle of inspection.

Recently at the launch of Judith Beveridge’s poetry collection Tintinnabulum — a book where the natural world is held up to the mind’s light and celebrated in a cascade of astonishing metaphors, where something is explained by allusion to everything but itself, which might seem a curious way to go about but there is no doubt, it works — so when I go to write about EF’s new work, I find myself thinking about Henry Raeburn’s Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch, for its feel of glide and grace, while in this work by EF’s there is no figure, there is a heightened sense of surface that has an icy, granular tactility, a sense of forward motion, maybe the work slightly lifts from the canvas?

Somewhere in ‘Somewhere between Silver and Stone’ Fielden has altered our optics, we are both very close and a long way off. Like lapiz lazuli that has travelled through time from one artist to another, like starlight.

Carol Jenkins

November 2024

Emma Fielden, ‘Somewhere between silver and stone,’ 2024, lapis lazuli, oil, silver point and gesso on linen, 60 x 70cm, Photographer: D...

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Curiosity Cabinet

As a child I thought there was a jewel box hidden in my parent's house, I imagined there was a cache of pink cut glass rings - the ones with adjustable soft metal sizing - laid out in pink foam in the nailed tight plyboard box in my brothers' walk-in robe.

Years later, I realised the box was really the back of the bathroom cabinet. I got a lot of enjoyment out of those pink glass jewels that weren't there. Imaginery treasures are curiously satisfying.

Here is a central point where someone who might be interetested can see what bits of words, some links to work published in journals and ezines, and images that I have made.

Absent Knowledge

We are talking about knowing certain facts,

and he says, I know all that or used to,

it is only that I can’t remember.

Is this not knowing or forgetting

what you know? Perhaps the head holds

a trace of what was there,

perhaps it is there but can’t find

the way out; maybe it was there but left,

or there was a rumour that it was coming

but never did,

like the promised holiday ,

in Pennant Hills. At eight years old

I would lie in bed at night a hardly contained

precipice of anticipation that time

would take me to Pennant Hills and a big house

with a swimming pool. I can see

the façade of the house, the curve

of suburban street, where that house

I never went to might be - or even was.

Though I know I never went, maybe

somewhere, there is an unborn memory

of being there, and I am thwarted by absent knowledge

from enjoying what I did not do.

Carol Jenkins

From Voices from the Meadow Wollongong Workshop Anthology 2007 ( Five Islands Press)

Bambiraptor

The Going Down Swinging # 25 -special double CD edition has at last unwrappped itself in Sydney, with a lauch at the Last Bastion of Civilisation last Wednseday 25 September. I still don't know what is in this CD it apart from my spoken word poem Bambiraptor as I was incarcarated in an invention called Good Mummydom. I hope every one else had a good time at the launch party.

The fossil Bambiraptor’s importance in the evolutional of dexterity and the dissonant name gave me this rave by Blanche (Street Car Named Desire) - here she makes a play for Bambiraptor believing his tough and powerful persona is lined with tenderness, like Stanley. This poem is one of my bids to get fossils to colonise and take over the myth as the substratum of literature.