India Flint Otherwhere 2002
About this time last year, I made a special out-of-season trip to the Wayville Showgrounds to see a graduating MA students’ show called Winterbodies. Among the graduands were Stephanie Radok and India Flint, Stephanie having occupied the Handicrafts Hall and India the Sheep Sales Pavilion as exhibition spaces.
Now they are together again in the more imposing city location of the Artspace, grandly overlooking the Festival Centre Plaza. Curiously, there is a deserted, unused air about this venue too, the Plaza being currently under reconstruction and mostly cordoned off. You can only reach Artspace by a circuitous route, with a devotee’s dedication.
A peculiarly high, airy space, Artspace allows Flint’s work, especially, full impact. India Flint works with felt, cotton and natural dyes, and for this show she has created a hymn to the place of the human in the natural order, humankind seen as coterminous with, intertwined with the green world. A long, narrow felt robe, long enough for two humans standing on each others’ shoulders, hangs from the ceiling just inside the doors, dyed in browns and oranges that even the uninitiated will recognise as naturally-derived, a ruched panel down its front and small amber beads worked into the neckline. It’s a dignified, timeless garment with a hieratic aura, the boiled wool left unironed and rough. Gloves made of the same material, with a gauze trim, and similarly dyed, adorn a wall. Alongside the felt gown is a diaphanous muslin one, with an intricately worked bodice, leaves and botanical names pencilled onto the skirt.
India Flint Otherwhere detail 2002
In a window, light streaming through it from behind, is an oversize white, billowing apron, also transparent, the bodice bearing stencil-cutout tulips and the skirt several rows of pockets full of seeds. Seeds in packets continue to radiate out from the apron on threads hung across the windows. A third dress hangs to the rear of the first two, this one sewn from weeds and brambles, impossibly fragile and affecting, strongly reminiscent of the fairytale maiden sewing bramble shirts for her enchanted swan-brothers. Flint has also made a plastic dome on a truncated table, containing plants in moss growing and transpiring, a ribbon of text concerning plants and their dispersal forming an equator round the half-globe.
Humble in colour and schematic in form, Stephanie Radok’s canvases line the back wall of the gallery. In greys and blues and faint yellows, so stylised they look like candelabra, her Tree of Life series rings changes on this theme, charged with both religious and folktale resonance. In juxtaposition with Flint’s installation pieces, they sound a similar note: all life interdependent, deriving from common elements, sapient life-forms only noteworthy for their special responsibility to nurture and respect the rest. Radok’s other pieces in this show are plaster tablets, moulded around book-covers and bearing reverse titles of some. They hang in groups of three or four, one in pink hues, one in blue, one set painted with leaves and flowers in browns and ochres and white, tokens of learning or instruction, echoing those archetypal tablets from the Big Guy.
Both Flint and Radok are pursuing themes they engaged with last year in Winterbodies. India Flint, in the Sheep Sales Hall, hung long, floating white muslin garments, laid woven wool trails, sprinkled snow-wool over sand in a doorway, hung overseas photos called ‘travels with a red felt ball’—the felt dyed with eucalyptus. Stephanie Radok, in the Handicrafts Hall, propped hundreds of red-and-yellow watercolours of simple plant-forms inside the vitrines, botanical sketches of South Australian flora labelled with the names of all the world’s countries. She had made plaster tiles cast from book-spines, as well.
Shown together, the works at Artspace echo off one another. Archetypes, simple forms, ‘natural’ materials, the Garden, the Earth, people (tempting to say ‘Man’ in this context, although Flint’s seed-filled apron is definitely a feminine appendage) as cultivators and propagators of a vegetative cornucopia which in turn supports us… these ideas cluster around all the pieces. There’s an unabashed piety about Flint’s work, referencing a Golden Age when the Folk were centred, earthed, in touch with the life force. And could be again, she seems to imply. It’s difficult, in the gallery, to read Radok’s work separately from Flint’s, so strongly do the felt and muslin and stitched-weed artefacts resonate with their vegetable, loamy associations, so loudly do they say their piece.
Radok's is plainchant to Flint's polyphony, a quieter song. Her medium is the series, subtle recastings of one or two motifs. Where her Plants of the World series ran to hundreds, here there are six World-Tree paintings. The small groups of plaster objects are called Varieties of Longing. For Flint, the medium is the message; her work is what it speaks and speaks what it is. Radok's pieces are a step closer to abstraction: repeated notes or letters. What strikes you is the harmony between the two bodies of work. The mood is nostalgic, quietly celebratory, free of irony. The viewer is invited to screen out the more unpleasant things the Folk get up to in their time off and concentrate on the still-intact (almost) verities of soil, seed, plant, tree, fruit, fleece and loom. And books. Manuals, perhaps, rather than Holy Writ.
It's a modest, if not modish proposal, engagingly stated. Easy on the eye and balm to the spirit.
