EXHIBITION REVIEW: 11/2011

A REVIEW: 11/2011 
REMADE, REWORKED, REIMAGINED: Sally Brown talks about place

Abstract
For quite a long time it has been claimed that cultural production in Tasmania has an inimitable and idiosyncratic place within the scheme of things. Sally Brown, a young Tasmanian designer, maker, artist, is unlikely to make this kind of claim for her work. Nonetheless, there is a particular sensibility evident in her work that it is doubtful that one might find anywhere other than in Tasmania – or made by someone of an older generation.

This review attempts to unpick some of the thinking to do with the placedness, the vernacular social paradigm, the subliminal politics, the ‘crafting’ and the cultural savvy that gives Sally Brown’s work its presence.  The questions that hang in the air around a collection of Sally Brown’s work are those to do with the ways local cultural imperatives might shape and make places they are found in and in what ways might places shape the cultural realities that inhabit them.
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If you have spent any time at all in southern Tasmania, and outside urban Hobart, when you enter Sally Brown’s exhibition at Launceston’s Design Centre you might well sense a hint of, a memory of, reminiscences of a southern Tasmanian placescape. Its presence is implanted in the objects. However, there’re no Taswegian clichés, there’s no Huon pine, there’re no Tassie devils, no apples nor anything of that ilk. So, just what is it that invokes this placedness
and that seems to have scorched itself into these objects?

Sally Brown says that her work, her style, her practice, is informed by her ‘natural’ environment but somehow one senses that there is something more to it than that. There seems to be a kind of Zen sensibility and a spareness that suggests that her practice is more than ‘informed’ by her placedness – its embedded in it perhaps.

In a way the ‘wabi-sabi’ idea comes to mind but as convenient as it may be to settle there for an allegory, somehow that’s not quite it or even enough. The Japanese architect Tadao Ando says, “wabi-sabi is flea markets, not warehouse stores; aged wood, not Pergo; rice paper, not glass. It celebrates cracks and crevices and all the other marks that time, weather, and loving use leave behind. It reminds us that we are all but transient beings on this
planet that our bodies as well as the material world around us are in them process of returning to the dust from which we came … Pared down to its barest essence, [its] the Japanese art of finding beauty in imperfection and
profundity in nature, of accepting the natural cycle of growth, decay, and death.”

Yes, yes, Sally Brown’s brand of placedness is not a million miles away from wabi-sabi yet it has a kind of hereness, a nowness, and a smell of rawness about it that sets it apart somehow. There are vernacular hallmarks that announce a distinctive and idiosyncratic authenticity. The sensibility is insightful, more than it might be romantic; its intuitive and reflective; and it comes across as being instinctive. It is far away from being slick, chic or trendy – yet it is nonetheless elegant and quite polished in its own way.

These ‘Tasmanian’ objects pose questions to do with the making of place and ‘things’. Questions like, do cultures shape and make the places you find them in? Do places shape the cultures that inhabit them? What makes a homeplace? ‘Place’ is an illusive and intangible idea. Its especially so when ‘place’ and ‘home’ come together as ‘homeplaces’ are imagined and deeply rooted in inherited perceptions – the kind of insight that is quiet, private and instinctive.

Interestingly, this exhibition is entitled “Remade,” that is remade rather than recycled or reused. Sally Brown says that there are “no rules” yet somehow there seems to be some even if they may not be sacrosanct – or anything that would disallow play. There is a contemporaneous sensibility at work here that draws on the ‘scrap yard’, the ‘opshop’ or the back shed rather than ‘the bush’, ‘the forest’ and clearly not a warehouse.

This ‘remade’ sensibility here seems to bring with it a narrative of a kind but not one that is by necessity overtly fettered to, or adherent to, some political dogma. It is often said that Tasmania’s landscapes are being exploited – mined? – but
there is a different kind of ‘mining’ going on here that is intelligent – conceivably something that’s gentle, insightful and sensible. Rather than some hardnosed pragmatism and the uniformity of the international disconnect that ‘dislocates’
much current cultural production – there is space in this work for poignancy ambiguity and private contemplation.

Rather than being invited to look at blended, and blanded, panoramas we are invited to spend some time looking at the world through that lens that the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractals alerted us to – the part, the fraction, the place(?), that represents, embodies and invokes the whole.

Sally Brown’s work is spare, pared back and ‘crafted’. The playful and often poetic conversations she had with herself, and that went on between her head and her hands, and that you find in her ‘drawing’ and journal, is audible in every piece.

Sally Brown and the late Rosalie Gascoigne seem to share not only an explicit connectedness to place that is intensely local but also a vernacular and colloquial sense of materiality. Rosalie Gascoigne said of her materials that she liked ... getting things in from the paddock. They've had the sun, they've had therain, it's real stuff, it's not like stuff you buy from a hardware shop, I find that very inert and I remember Rauschenberg said once, it's been somewhere, it's done something, you know when he gathered in all his rubbish and did things. And it's got life essence in it, vitality even and dead stuff looks very dead to me.”

While Rosalie Gascoigne described herself as ”an assembler” rather than as a ‘maker’, Sally Brown seems to be right at home in her studio; in her workshop; or at her workbench; or wherever it is that she does her making. Like Rosalie Gascoigne’s “stuff” Sally Brown’s materials arrive invested with histories. Sally Brown says she thinks of herself as an artist cum designer who creates and makes objects that are both functional and sculptural.However one suspects that imaging her simply as a maker might not be at all insulting. One suspects that in those private conversations that one has with oneself away from the artworld, Sally Brown might be rather careless about artworld labels.

Sally Brown’s attentiveness to materiality gives her work substance – as do the processes that are informed by her sense of materiality. Likewise, the patterns, textures and colours that inhabit her ‘objects’ nurture her apparent bonds to ‘her place’and it shines through in its omnipresence. There are stories and histories invested in these objects. There are narratives there too but like all good narratives they’re the ones we construct in front of them kind of object Sally Brown makes and with our memories and consciousness in top gear. We are all inveterate storytellers and we need very little prompting to get us going.

While we can sense that Sally Brown is talking about her homeplace, in doing so, as often as not, she invokes our own places in the world, wherever they may be. There are layers to Sally Brown’s narratives. Some are ubiquitous and to some extent are not so place specific. Even though they may be constructed in another ‘homeplace’ many of these stories land right on our own doorstep.

In the end, confronted by one of Sally Brown’s ‘objects’ we are almost unavoidably engaged with its placedness and perhaps thinking about the ways objects invoke such cultural memories and underpin our placedness.

Ray Norman Nov. 2011
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