Text extract from Dunedin Public Art Gallery website: https://dunedin.art.museum/exhibitions/past/suite-2021-part-1/
suite 20/21: part one
Ayesha Green: Wrapped up in Clouds 29 August 2020 - 29 November 2020 A DPAG Biennial Contemporary Dunedin Programme
Ayesha Green All My Lovers Are Immigrants (Smooth My Pillow) Diptych 2020. Acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the Artist.
"Far from being neutral, historical depictions and written accounts of the landscape have been closely shaped by subjective views and shifting cultural power. In Wrapped up in Clouds Ayesha Green explores multiple views of the landscape, considering how these are implicated in systems of power and control. Green’s work begins to tease out understandings of ‘landscape’ as a fluid subject – a site of cultural performance that can be complicated, destabilised and enlivened through the acts of recording, painting, or documentation.1 "
The idea of exploring landscapes that are "implicated in systems of power and control" is really interesting in relation to my own ideas around responding to landscape via my practice. Through reading Geoff Park's Theatre Country: Essays on Landscape & Whenua, I have looked into the idea of how land is superintended via conservation organisations like DOC and other such establishments that see land as something that needs to be managed and shaped by humans. Conservation groups, in my experience, also act as 'environmental educators' for the wider public. I am interested in how Green unpacks these ideas and introduces other aspects, as well as her own experiences of what landscape could be through her works.
"The works in this exhibition traverse a range of ways through which we have come to understand the land. In the diptych All of my lovers are immigrants (smooth my pillow) (2020), Green paints two embracing couples, each entwined beneath an extravagant botanical quilt. The botanical images represent the landscape in these paintings, with Green using the work to consider ‘the relationships between land, body, and knowledge’ as well as the ‘politics and weaponising of love and land’.2 Botanical classification and art are ways that Green considers the subjective nature of describing the landscape. She looks to diverse sources, ranging from colonial botanists and naturalists like Joseph Banks (1743-1820) and Daniel Solander (1733-1782), to the work of modern botanical artists such as Audrey Eagle (b.1925), and the writing of ecologist Geoff Park (1946-2009). Considered through these filters, Green’s botanical works challenge the authority of the rendered image – reminding the viewer that every specimen drawing, despite its age or status, is a subjective form, shaped both by context and the identity of its maker. "
These are also really interesting points about botanical artists and works, especially considering their histories within colonial times and how they are still revered and preserved to this day. This had obvious ties to landscape and how these colonial perspectives still hold a great deal of influence through their preservation.
Like images, the written word is also a slippery medium. Landscape Painting (2020) hinges on the process of translating language. In this ceramic installation Green explores words in English and te reo Māori that have been used to describe landscape features, centring on the varying meanings of kupu Māori in relation to the land and the body. The series Dear Ayesha, love from Joseph (2020) is populated with landscape descriptions written by Joseph Banks, drawn out of his HMS Endeavour journal. Green paints in kōkōwai, or red ochre earth, reshaping Banks’ words out of the whenua of the country he describes.3 Coming full circle within her exhibition, Green uses her work to pose an alternative description of the landscape that is grounded in her own critical enquiry and her lived experience of this place."
...maybe i should look up Joseph Banks and his HMS Endeavour journal.
I really like how Green explored the own relationship to the landscape and her "lived experience." My own experience of the landscape around me is what drives me to question the colonial perspectives of sites and how they are only respected through what humans/conservation groups have done to them or "made" them.
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1. For further reading see Geoff Park, Theatre Country: Essays on Landscape & Whenua. Victoria University Press (Wellington: 2006) 2. Artist communication, July 2020 3.Sir Joseph Banks, The Endeavour Journal of Sir Joseph Banks [25 August 1768-12 July 1771] http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks05/0501141h.html
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