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In (and Out of) the Grey (Sara Maher)
Bett Gallery, Tasmania, July 2 -24, 2021
Amplify (Only when you leave) (Nigel Farley)
Moonah Arts Centre, Tasmania, July 1-31, 2021
MAC public toilets : Site-responsive sound installation
Some strange birds have come into the suburbs. Some have found their way into the attic spaces of the MAC building…
The MAC toilets space represented to me a kind of cul-de-sac away from the ‘everyday’ busyness of the arts centre, a space where notions of nature “coming into the space”, due to our frequent absence, might even play out. In this context, it is well known that with reduced human presence comes differences in how birds, bats and other animals communicate and exploit new opportunities created in our absence.
The work draws a parallel to 2020’s Covid 19 lockdowns, brief periods which saw a reduction in road, air traffic and industry allowing nature to reclaim for a time the cities’ street spaces and airspace—the space here representing a scaled down version of the complex entanglement between ourselves and ecologies where overlap occurs. In the same way it explores links to the ‘depressing’, paradoxical, ‘weird, uncanny, and—strangely—sweet awareness of the world’ within which the notion of ‘dark ecology’ finds meaning (Morton, 2016).
I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners being the Dhudhuroa of the Kiewa Valley and Yaitmathang of the Bogong High Plains —both regions in N.E. Victoria where recordings of birdlife were made (March 2021). With thanks to Bogong Centre for Sound Culture.
Amplify : Only when you leave (section of Junction Dam, Bogong, March 2021)
Where time folds endlessly
Biennale Of Australian Art (BOAA), Sept-Nov, 2018
George Farmer & Co Bacon Factory, Ballarat, VIC
Site-responsive installation : sculptural objects, light, sound
Visual and sound art converge within the alcove of three curing rooms in the former 19th century George Farmer and Co. Bacon Factory. In this slowly decaying and forgotten space, it is as if some alteration has occurred, creating passage into a sensory 'terrain vague’, an ambiguous zone where past, present and future enfold. Fragile objects and painted thresholds suspend in a layered soundfield, lending a feeling that one is glimpsing into a creative process - where the decaying world of outer reality becomes interwoven with the immaterial realm of inner consciousness.
Video link (Where time folds endlessly 2018)
Where time folds endlessly, 2018
Photos : Vikk Shayan 1-17, Peter Whyte 18--22
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Slowly fading in, slowly fading out, 2018
Evolving from solo residencies (Nigel, 2018, Sara, 2016) in lutruwita (Tasmania), amid the grey-winter Highland terrain of warloundigerler (Cradle Mountain), this collaborative piece explores the intersection of our memories, reflecting on the subliminal threshold where visual and aural perception interweave.
It depicts the moving texture of water saturated air, morphing with ancient geologies across two frames, suspended in a crystalline soundfield of icy rain and white-noise. Here, the inner self meets the intangible otherness of expanded environment, where the sensory immediacy of landscape immersion and the weight of unsettled memory and emotion in place coincide. Sound
Slowly fading in, slowly fading out, 2018 ; ink, pigment on paper, 154 x 254cm, photo : Jack Bett
Sara Maher : The Breath of Matter Itself
2018 Hutchins Australian Contemporary Art Prize
Brooke Street Pier, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
Highly Commended : Artery Tasmanian Artist’s Prize
Judges : Pat Brassington, Edward Colless and Dr Peter Hill
In lutruwita (Tasmania), I seek a language to describe the variance I feel between resonances that evoke an expansion of "being" in place and atmospheres of unsettled cultural memory where layered human histories intersect, in the land and in the psyche. Each piece is a meditation on materiality and a subtle metaphorical response to place and its energies.
Evolving from a residency in the Central Highland Country of warloundigerler (Cradle Mountain), The Breath of Matter Itself is a phenomenological response that intimates the unseen - metaphysically charged by means of alchemic and gravitational processes, ambiguities of light and shadow, resonances of geological time, history prevailing in the land, and the slowed correspondence of mind with matter.
The breath of matter itself 2016-17, War loun dig er ler (Cradle Mountain), ink & pigment on paper, 150 x 114 cm, photo : Simon Cuthbert
(Please see detail of image below)
Of the half-light
Bett Gallery, Hobart, Tasmania
25 Nov’ - 12 Dec, 2016
Solo Dombrovskis Parks and Wildlife Residency (Sara)
Including a 2 week collaborative component with Nigel
warloundigerler (Cradle Mountain)
Sculptural assemblage, liquid media on clay board and paper, etched copper, installed sound.
“ Each day I walked through mossy forest, out to misty, glaciated mountain and lake terrain. I would collect small figure-like ephemera shaped by the elements - twigs and driftwood fragments, the remains of ancient life forms, imaginary creatures and other story remnants. Land and lake often became shrouded in mist, evoking an amorphous, fluid and quietly fluctuating world of obscured details and muted colours. At times it was difficult to gauge distance and depth. Bodies of land, water and self blurred, submerged in weathered terrain.
My sense of the edges and overlaps of time and space deepened while on residency. The temporally near and far, intimate space and immense outside space, merged. Feelings of embodied connection to the highland country resonated with the weight of memory and emotion in place, as the figure/shadow of my Irish and European ancestry walked across Aboriginal land. My small sculptural assemblages, miniature drawings, watercolours and large abstract painting gave form to this layered experience.
Memories continue to filter through my work, linked to an engagement with phenomena of my Hobart surrounds - clouds amassing over kunanyi (Mount Wellington), a clearing night sky, tiny marsupial bones evoking old life forms, thistledown - floating like snow crystals on the wind - growing prolifically across a South Hobart vale once known as 'Valley of the Shadow of Death'…" (Sara)
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"Sara's two month residency incorporated a two week period of collaborative experimentation, linking our shared encounter of place with an exploration of the subliminal threshold between our visual and aural media. I made hydrophone recordings of snow falling, dripping hollows, run-off streams and creek flow, along with contact mic recordings of weathered infrastructure - shingled rooftops of huts, rusted corrugated iron sheeting, wire fencing... These were later transformed through layering and subtle abstraction to suggest peripheral undercurrents of the Cradle Mountain environment, and to converge with sensory resonance in Sara's visual work.” (Nigel) Sound ; Artist profile (Arts Tasmania artist profile video : Sara on Residency at Cradle Mountain)
The Breath of Matter Itself (detail), 2016 : Ink and pigment on paper. Full image : 150 x 114cm, detail: 70 x 114cm, photo : Simon Cuthbert
A ritual for leaving, 2017 : Ink, pigment, de-seeded thistledown on paper in deep set frame, 162 x 118 x 7cm, photo : Peter Whyte. Below : detail.
Composite image ...left : How to hold silence, 2016 : glass bottle, de-seeded dandelion, 18 x 8 x 8cm ; right : Moon pool, 2016, gouache on scratch board, 15 x 15cm, photo: Jack Bett
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top centre : Detail : Origins (marsupial) 2016 : watercolour, ink, found bone on clay board, full image : 15 x 15 cm, detail : 12 x 8 cm, photo : Jack Bett
second row left : Night figures 2016, watercolour on scratchboard, framed, 15 x 15cm (image size)
second row right : Land memory (Mother) 2016, watercolour, driftwood on clay board, framed, 27 x 27cm (frame size)
third row left : In relation 1 (grove) 2016, waterclour, twig, on clay board, framed, 27 x 27cm (frame size)
third row right : In relation 2 (kernel) 2016, watercolour and kernel on clay board, frame, 18 x 18cm (frame size)
bottom left : Erupting silence 2 2016, watercolour and ink on clay board, framed, 27 x 27 cm (frame size)
bottom right : Erupting silence 1 2016, watercolour and ink on clay board, framed, 20 x 20 cm (clay board size)
photos : Peter Whyte
In the hollows 2 2016, watercolour and driftwood fragment on paper, framed, 21 x 15 cm (paper size), photo : Peter Whyte
Forest lines, 2016 : etched copper, ink, 15 x 20 cm, photo : Jack Bett
Origins (skink) 2016, gouache and watercolour on scratch board, framed; 19.5 x 24.5 cm (frame size) ; photo : Peter Whyte
Where one world gleams into another, 2016
Where one world gleams into another, 2014 : Ink and clay (from Queenstown, West Coast Tasmania) on hand-scored and abraded paper, 134 x 172cm. photo : Jack Bett, Sound (headphones req'd)
Detail, right panel: Where one world gleams into another, 2014
Where the shadow falls
Queenstown Heritage & Arts Festival, 2014 (now The Unconformity)
A Constance ARI project funded by QHAF and Arts Tasmania
Lake Margaret Heretige Hydro Village, West Coast Tasmania
Site-responsive installation set in the superintendent's home/ruin
10-12th October, 2014
Collected objects, site responsive drawing (hand-scored tree branch shadows on paper), light, installed sound
"Sara Maher and Nigel Farley's delicate sound-augmented installation, Where the shadow falls, marks the intervening years with the effect of the damp conditions on the fabric of the old houses - the shadows literally flaking, dissolving, falling - accentuating the unrelenting and yet strangely beautiful process
of decay." - Jane Deeth, Review excerpt, 'Working Water: Making Home', Artlink Magazine, March 2015 . Sound ; Review by Jane Deeth
Where the shadow falls, 2014, photos : Sara Maher
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Echoic memory
Catherine Asquith Gallery
Collingwood, Melbourne
8 - 26th Oct, 2013
Mixed media works on paper, installed sound
This exhibition was initiated through a shared residency at the Broken Hill Art Exchange, NSW :
"In contemplating the intangible boundaries of wide open spaces - land and sky, day and night, sound and silence - one meets physiological and psychological boundaries of the self, namely the limits of seeing and hearing, and the point at which consciousness turns to reverie. Through experiencing atmospheric and peripheral phenomena of a semi-desert region - shifting light, micro-textures, dispersed/muted sound - one senses a heightened attention to spatiality and dimensionality. One also comes to interpret the landscape through perceived illusions - afterimage, mirage, colour vibration, sound reverberation, etc. It is at the peripheral limits of the senses that persistent yet mutable memories become imprinted on our psyche." Sound
To Transcend Beyond the Cave, To Levitate Above the Trees, 2013 ; ink, clay on paper, 149 x 88cm, photo : Jack Bett
Receding Light III, 2013 : ink, pigment, pastel, pencil, pen on paper, 18 x 45cm, photo : Matthew Stanton
Receding Light I, 2013 : ink, pigment, pastel, pencil, pen on paper, 18 x 61cm, photo : Matthew Stanton
Memories of space - Sara Maher
146 Arts Tasmania, Hobart,Tasmania
September-October 2011
works on paper, sculptural assemblage, Installed sound
- Solo Dombrovskis Parks and Wildlife Residency (Sara)
leeawulena (Lake St Clair), Central Highlands, Tasmania
- One month self-initiated residency (Sara and Nigel)
care of LARQ (Landscape Art Research Queenstown), West Coast, Tasmania
This exhibition explored notions of vastness and confinement in response to two inland Tasmanian locations - Lake St Clair and Queenstown. Responding to the intangible boundaries of shoreline and horizon, darkness and dawn, and sound and silence at Lake St Clair, in contrast with the enclosed spaces of decaying ruins and cavernous mining tunnels at Queenstown - the exhibition reflected on how consciousness, through the senses - is experienced : 'If there exists a borderline between mental and physical terrain, it wavers and trembles: it is soft, with vague shapes and edges both devolving toward and evolving from nothingness; it reveals itself through ambiguity and contradiction.' (Sara) Catalogue essay by Sean Kelly ; Sound
Vigil, 2010: ink, pigment on paper, 160 x 114cm, photo : Peter Angus Robinson
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Anywhere out of this world, 2011 : found ephemera, ink, pigment on paper, 33 x 33 cm (frame depth 7cm)
Canopy, 2012 : ink, pigment on hand punctured paper, 117 x 83cm, photo : Bernie Carr
Four walls of solitude
Sara Maher & Nigel Farley
Out of Site, July-August 2011
CAT (Contemporary Art Tasmania),
Curated by Claire Needham
Catalogue essay by Claire Needham
Four walls of solitude, 2011, Mixed media on paper; sound, 170 x 115cm approx' each, Photo: Clair Needham
A response to Tasmania's penal past, incarceration and psychological states of isolation. Four panels, side by side, and a fifth positioned high above an adjacent wall, reflect on the desolate confines that imprisoned convicts, their scarred histories, and the hallucinatory effect that such spaces might have induced. Sound and image merge in a synaesthesia-like way evoking, through the walls, portals to fantasised escape. Ideas evolved in the time-worn graffiti-laden cells of the Hobart Penitentiary. "In the same way senses interweave, the auditory and visual impression in the work feed one another and transform, causing our perception to become altered.." (Clair Needham). Sound ; Review by Scot Cotterell.
First wall, 2011, Mixed media on paper, 170 x 115cm, Photo: Bernie Carr Third wall, 2011, Mixed media on paper, 170 x 115cm, Photo: Bernie Carr
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Inland
LARQ (Landscape Art Research Queenstown), TAS
May 2011,
Solo Dombrovskis Parks and Wildlife Residency (Sara)
leeawulena (Lake St Clair), Central Highlands TAS
Large works on paper, installed sound
"Moments of sensory immediacy that heightened my appreciation and apprehension of place offered a poetic window through which I investigated the abstract language behind my making. A series of soundscapes by Nigel were created post-residency... Sound and image merged subliminally to register a resonant connection to the experience of vastness, and its contradictory other, confinement." Sound ; LARQ annual program page
Whiteout, 2010 : ink, pigment on paper, 114x 86cm, photo : Jan Dallas
Gap in the Forest, 2010 : ink, pigment on paper, 140 x 114cm, photo : Jan Dallas
Cumulus, 2010 : ink, pigment on paper, 132 x 113cm, photo : Bernie Carr
