The paintings are finished (by the skin of my teeth!), the photography completed and now the works are at the gallery! It is an honour to be exhibiting with May Space Gallery in Sydney, Australia for a second year. It is profoundly supportive to have a gallery working with me to exhibit, promote and sell my work. Brenda May and her team, Eleanor and Amy are knowledgeable, skilful, honest, straightforward, understanding, compassionate and unfailingly helpful! I make the paintings and then I pass the baton over to them! What a blessing and privilege!!!
This year’s work is a change for me. These works are painted on stretched linen. This is the first body of work where I have painted on linen; I have previously used paint and collage on board. When I studied at the National Art School in Sydney, I used to joke that one day I would learn how to paint without the use of collage. My tutors dismissed my comments but in my heart I knew I longed to do just that.
It wasn’t that I did not know how to paint. It wasn’t that I thought painting with collage was problematic. However I was keenly aware that the use of collage in my paintings was not simply an aesthetic choice. Something about the physical act of cutting paper or canvas and looking for concrete shapes helped me to see and organise visual input. I did not understand why or how this worked but I was keenly aware it had to do with how my brain processed visual information.
I have always wanted to construct rather than depict paintings. For me constructing a painting means using shapes of paint and arranging them to build an image very much the way we construct a building or take lego pieces and build something. In order to do this, I needed to learn to see the world differently. By collaging, I taught myself to break down form and three dimensional reality into shapes.
In this body of work, ‘Where Architecture Meets the Land,’ I used only paint. While I find the shapes with increasing ease in architecture, I found it particularly challenging when I looked at a mass of vegetation where I could not see the structure and form within it. I found myself repeatedly lost. It took time and continual looking and fumbling with the paint until I found some form, shape or structure.
This brings me to painting the landscape. It is not a subject I have engaged with very often despite its popularity in Australian art. I have never felt drawn to visually examine landscape. I stumbled into these paintings rather than planned them during a three month house sit in Wootton, NSW in 2016. I began ‘Wootton Bliss’ at the end of this period. My intent was to see if I could paint without collage. Then two years later I had a residency at Bundanon Trust where I began three paintings - ‘The Joy of Working at Bundanon Trust,’ ‘Winter Mornings at Bundanon Trust’ and ‘Passing Clouds’ - that looked at the land through architecture. I continued to paint without collage. These paintings were difficult to resolve. I found myself painting and leaving them out of frustration over long periods of time until they were finally completed. In 2020, after having finished the first four paintings, I started the remaining paintings from Vaucluse House in Sydney - ‘Morning Sun,’ ‘Leaves of Joy’ and ‘Listening to Silence.’ I began to understand why landscape posed such a challenge. When looking at the natural environment in all its majesty, the multitude of visual complexity and information was simply overwhelming. It took a mammoth effort to sift through all the stimulus to find the relevant information.
The topic of this show, the relationship between architecture and the land seems particularly relevant today as we have recently witnessed the fires that ravaged so much of Australia. The devastation was beyond comprehension and how we are living begs thoughtful reflection. It seemed important to ponder the space where architecture and the land touch, intermingle and relate. While making these paintings, I experienced how the land holds, surrounds, protects, invades, shades, covers and engages with the architecture. They are integral to one another.
Are we who design, build, inhabit and maintain architectural structures aware of the partnership we have with the land our buildings inhabit and dance with? Do we care for and nurture this partnership?
Agnes Tyson - Where Architecture Meets the Land 22 July - 8 August 2020
May Space Gallery 409b George Street Waterloo, NSW 2017 Tuesday - Saturday, 10am - 5 pm