Patsy Hely Local birds tea set
Canberra-based ceramicist Patsy Hely's recent solo-exhibition Pastoralia at Craft ACT was a delight for the senses and intellect alike. On entering the darkened gallery, the spectator was met by an eerie glow emanating from two plinths where the domestic-ware vases and tea sets were just visible, seeming to glow, shimmer and pulsate with energy. And yet, the overall effect was also one of stillness, of tranquillity, evoking T.S. Eliot's description of ‘the still point of the turning world' in The Four Quartets , where ‘a Chinese jar still moves perpetually in its stillness'. On closer inspection, and to the accompaniment of bird-calls echoing through the gallery, the intricate details began to appear, emerging from the darkness; the beautiful, hand-painted birds and flora of the Canberra region.
The exhibition, featuring ceramic vessels ranging from a tea-set to sand-blasted found vases raised interesting and important eco-critical issues concerning the contemporary understanding and appreciation of nature; the intersections between nature, the pastoral and the nostalgic; and how ceramics can be used to navigate between these concerns.
Hely's work could therefore be said to illustrate ceramic theorist Philip Rawson's intuition that ‘the simple everyday object, the pot, upon which all the feeling responses are focused is able to carry a complex meaning from one mind to another. The object of the everyday world acts as an immediate vehicle.' (Rawson 1971: 16) Rawson believes that the connections and interconnections of meanings that ceramics invites can ‘never be closed and abstract but always remain open' (ibid). It is this openness towards interpretation, along with Hely's questing and questioning stance, that invites multiple readings and possibilities for understanding our contemporary relations to nature and our place within (or without) it. Hely herself describes her work as a way of clarifying and thinking through ideas, rather than a means of making an assertion or statement about a state of affairs. Her reinvestigation of the traditional tea-set can be seen to rely on the associations tea drinking has with the ever pressing social need to develop meaningful relationships between people based on sharing, as well as the further association between tea drinking and introspective contemplation, quiet reflection and consideration.
Hely's primary motivation for this series is to question not only what relation we have with nature today but, particularly, how objects can and do help navigate that relationship. She is interested in how objects negotiate rather than define place, particularly in the face of the growing difficulty and uncertainty over ownership, land-rights, and belonging in contemporary Australia. Interestingly, it is this question about the role objects play in our attachments to place and nature that also motivates the theoretical work of Hely's Doctoral thesis, which she is currently undertaking at the School of Art, ANU. In her investigation into early Colonial Australian artefacts such as the Sydney Cove Medallion and Bennelong's House, Hely questions how a sense of place can be inferred and interpreted from such material culture, as well as how our notions of belonging, home and nostalgia are played out in and through these artefacts. Hely believes such objects paradoxically fuel our ideas of displacement and alienation, the very feelings their status as key artefacts or relics is meant to dispel. These colonial experiences of displacement and alienation, Hely believes, continue today where European Australians are occupants of another's land.
It is precisely this investigation into the construction of place through a consideration of nature and ceramics that motivates Hely's Pastoralia series. Ceramics and nature have had a long and intersecting history. Clay itself is a ‘natural' material that speaks of the specificity of the place it was dug from, but further, ceramics have a long tradition of depicting or referring to nature. And yet, Hely argues, these representations do not construct place for us in the here and now, but tend to represent the nature of another country, or an abstracted, idealised nowhere. Hely's ceramics point the way to a new possibility for understanding what she calls ‘a local and ecological present'.
The ways in which Hely's work represent this local and ecological present are fascinating. They involve techniques, methodologies and ideas that sometimes draw from her earlier work, and others that have been developed specifically for the work in this exhibition. Some of the key ideas which underpin the series include a consideration of place and nature in terms of ownership and belonging; memory, nostalgia and the pastoral; ideal, universal, absolute and generic space versus real, local, contingent and specific place; authenticity versus artificiality; enactment, mapping and tracing; presence and absence.
Ownership and Belonging
Hely's work, both critical and aesthetic, considers how to establish a sense of belonging to place, especially when one feels to be an ‘interloper'. That is, Hely explains, she is a relative newcomer to Canberra, and relates to Immants Tillers' suggestion that, for non-Indigenous Australians, ‘part of being an Australian is feeling part of somewhere else' (Meacham, 2005). In response to these feelings of displacement, Hely's work is the embodiment—or enactment—of how to establish a personal sense of place and belonging through techniques such as mapping, documenting and representing one's immediate surroundings. These strategies are crucial for the development of the current series. By walking around the immediate surrounds, painting and collecting what is in the immediate vicinity, Hely demonstrates how neutral space becomes personal place. She is quick to point out, however, that this process of getting to know one's place is not one of claiming ownership, but is rather, an observational strategy.
Memory, Nostalgia and the Pastoral
Using research undertaken for her Doctorate, Hely reveals that nostalgic artefacts such as souvenirs, keep-sakes, mementos or relics, produce a complex relation to place because they ‘act as repositories of memory with the capacity to compress and concentrate the past', and in pointing away from the present disrupt our sense of the specificity of place in the here and now. Further, these artefacts carry with them the ideologies that accompanied their production, and thus a nostalgic relationship with these artefacts can shape contemporary values by keeping those past values present. In an earlier body of work, drawing explicitly on this relationship between memory and objects, Hely re-represented, from memory, past places she had previously painted or photographed. These ideas of memory and nostalgic relations to the past, mediated through drawing and photography, led to Hely's interest in how the depiction of place, particularly on ceramics, is often idealised and nostalgic, even overtly sentimental. However, it was through further consideration of the nostalgic that Hely, via poetry and the literary genre of Nature Writing, encountered Terry Gifford's account of the pastoral. Hely became interested in what Gifford saw as the three broad conceptions of the Pastoral as first, the traditional pre-1600's Greek and Roman understanding of the pastoral as invoking a ‘retreat and return', out into nature and back again as a respite; secondly, a literary device where the rural is celebrated over the urban; and finally the more contemporary ecocritical perspective whereby an ecological perspective is combined with a post-colonial feminist perspective to explore how the conquest of nature, along with those subordinated on account of race, class or sex, can be aligned for critical activism.
The Specificity of Place
Pastoralia is a series that explicitly represents the specificity of place rather than the more traditional generic representation of nature on ceramic objects. In an attempt to move away from purely generic or idealised decoration, Hely seeks to establish a real connection between her work and the real world. This is not simply an aesthetic preference, but an ecological imperative to establish real connections between nature, place and object. Hely, following theorists Henri Lefebvre and Yi-Fu Tuan, seeks to inscribe place as real, local, contingent and specific as opposed to ideal, universal, absolute and generic. She achieves this in her work by taking, as a starting point, her immediate environment. The deceptively simple idea of acquiring a sense of place by looking at the birds that frequent it has led to a beautiful array of imagery featuring birds in Hely's work. Using only birds that are specific to this area, Hely draws on the Canberra Ornithologist website to represent the birds that help constitute the nature of this place here and now. Hely demonstrates a lovely touch in her underglaze painting, with a naturalistic, watercolour feel and a muted palette.
These documentary activities, drawing on ideas about the specificity of place and time, have been developing throughout Hely's oeuvre. Much of her earlier work drew exclusively on what could be seen in her own backyard. Thus, she collected and slip-cast twigs and seedpods from her garden, drew the species of plants that grew there, and the species of birds that visited. Other work took her further afield to document the surrounding neighbourhood in a series of vases called ‘Where I Live', with maps of the local area carved into their surface. This phenomenological exercise of walking, documenting, and mapping as the enactment of place and belonging is also evident in the Pastoralia series. That is, the curatorial decisions made in the placement of this work continue many of the relevant themes of the work. First, the minimalist placement of the work on two plinths separated by the space of the gallery force the viewer to walk toward and between the two groupings of objects. As a viewer, one becomes conscious of this phenomenological act of passage, of transcribing space. Walking, like tea drinking, Hely explains, can also be very meditative, another example of the pastoral experience of retreat and return, whereby nature is used as a temporary retreat from civilisation, to which one returns, rejuvenated. Secondly, the dimly lit room with its eerie blue glow from the cathode-ray tube, Hely tells us, is to invoke the contemporary experience of walking around the suburbs at night, with homes lit by the blue glow of television screens. Nature documentaries on television have become, for many, the only available contemporary experience of the pastoral retreat and return. Finally, the use of sound recordings of bird-song in the installation constitutes an enactment or performance of place.
Patsy Hely Installation view
Mediation, Authenticity and Artificiality
The use of sound-recordings as well as the reference to television raises some interesting questions about place in terms of mediation, authenticity and artificiality. Place and nature, for many urban dwellers is mediated, for instance, through the television. Nature is represented at its sublime and awesome best on documentaries featuring those exotic last pockets of wilderness that many will never encounter in actuality. Hely's work plays on these distinctions between the natural and the artificial, the original and the imitation, the real and the fake. For instance, her paintings of birds are themselves an imitation of reality, and other bird representations are actually decals rather than paintings. Similarly, the bird-calls which fill the air of the gallery are artificial; made by an Audubon bird-caller, meant to mimic the sound of the birds and bring them out of hiding, rather than a ‘real' recording or live performance.
Absence and Disappearance
The use of the bird-caller raises the question of the visibility and invisibility of nature. For many, an experience of the birds of our neighbourhood is of their being heard rather than seen. Hely's careful and detailed rendition of these birds on the tea-set, with only the use of an artificial bird-caller, raises interesting questions about representation and reality, presence and absence. On the second plinth are three traditionally decorated, found vases, where Hely has masked and sandblasted away areas of the decoration. In this work Hely is playing out the disappearance of the natural world, where only small pockets of wilderness, often in the form of national parks, are left. The areas of visible decoration are clarified and highlighted by the artificially created areas of absence. Again, the inspiration for this work has its roots in some of Hely's earlier experimentations. For instance, in her Nature Writing , exhibited in the Project Space at Object Gallery, Sydney in 2004, Hely took a found Bone China Plate and laser-cut the image of the bird out from the centre. These memorials to the absent or disappearing can be read as falling within the tradition of such counter-monuments as Christian Boltanski's Missing House , Grosshamburger Strasse, Berlin, 1990.
Ultimately, Patsy Hely's Pastoralia explores many crucial dichotomies between presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, natural and artificial, generic and specific, real and ideal. Her work, beautiful to behold and experience, is equally stimulating to consider within the context of the pressing ecological concern over nature and our place within it. With this in mind, it is fitting to end with ceramicist and theorist Stephen Dixon's assertion that ‘[c]eramic artists, like any other artists, do not work in a vacuum, everything we make is produced within the context of time, and place, and culture. The importance of ceramics historically has been as a carrier of meanings across cultures and across time' (Dixon 2005: 71).
Bibliography
Dixon, Stephen (2005) ‘The Sleep of Reason', Ceramics: Art and Perception , Sydney, no. 59, pp. 70-3.
Gifford, Terry (1999) Pastoral , Routledge, London.
Lefebvre, Henri (1991) The Production of Space, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford.
Meacham, Steve (2005) ‘Inspiration runs hot and cold', Spectrum: The Sydney Morning Herald , 22 October.
Rawson, Philip (1971) Ceramics , Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Tuan, Yi-Fu (1977) Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience , University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
| This article is presented in partnership with Craft ACT: Craft and Design Centre. |  |
