Distance

Paintings

Distance: These paintings form part of the exhibition Intersections presented at CraftACT 4 Feb-20 March 2021. The exhibition includes ceramics, drawings, paintings and sculptures exploring the premise of ‘getting lost’ as an approach to creative practice by artists Janet DeBoos and Wendy Teakel. Rebecca Solnit’s “A Field Guide to Getting Lost” is a point of departure for this research. Solnit suggests that people can get lost by simply not paying attention but advocates a better way to be lost, is in Walter Benjamin’s terms, “to be fully present …capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And (to make) a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography”.
But throughout 2020, ‘geography’ changed. What started out as a desire of both Teakel and DeBoos to explore the idea of their place (predicated on an understanding that they lived on colonised land)- became a year of uncertainty and shifting visions. The country in which they ‘got lost’ was Covid19, and the place where they sought to make sense of the changes came to be the bush environment around DeBoos’ home in the Brindabellas. Solnit's blue of distance has directly informed Teakel, as the distance she considers lies between the differences in approach to making her collaborator DeBoos takes as a ceramic artist and Teakel's own capacity with materials and ideas as a multi-disciplined artist

Teakel’s understanding of farmed, rural NSW brought containment – farm fencing, demarcation, holding paddocks and barbed wire- to this collaborative way of approaching place. DeBoos brought the botany of native flora, and the way in which that botany can invade- and define- our space through decorative art tropes such as the vase. But as Covid closed borders to travel, DeBoos’ regular engagement with China (and the home of porcelain) ended and what had been an attempt at a hybrid understanding of home and place- faded, and was profoundly affected by the very ‘Australian-ness’ of Teakel’s lens.

The works in this exhibition are themselves like diary entries, created as the two artists travelled the year, losing sight, getting lost and finding that their sense of home is not as fixed as they may have once argued- not fixed in any geographical sense- yet somehow inescapable.

All works acrylic paint, poker work & scorch marks on ply. Dimensions Height X Depth