Arthouse Gallery presents ‘In Return’, an evocative photomedia exhibition by leading contemporary artist Joshua Yeldham.

In December 2023 Yeldham’s unique hand-carved photographic practice will be highlighted in the National Gallery of Victoria ‘Triennial’ exhibition. The NGV has acquired Resonance (8 in a series of 9) for their permanent collection. The work features embellishments of acrylic paint, cane, wood and string.

The ‘Triennial’ series signifies one of the most ambitious and exciting projects ever embarked on by the NGV. ‘Triennial’ 2017 and ‘Triennial’ 2020 challenged, confronted, and inspired us to see the world differently – through the lens of artists and designers in the contemporary, art, design and architectural space from around the globe. Exploring current issues through ground-breaking works narrated by contemporary artists and designers, ‘Triennial’ 2023 will challenge visitors to think differently. Tony Ellwood AM, Director – National Gallery of Victoria

‘In Return’ continues and expands upon Yeldham’s complex photographic practice. The time the artist takes to paint, carve, and sculpt each piece is rewarded by the time it deserves to know them: To connect with the vibrational hum between positive and negative space.

Exhibition video - https://vimeo.com/857333301

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In Return – Georgina Reid

It is impossible to meander through life without entanglement. Without becoming both knotted and unspooled, woven and unwoven. It is possible, however, to be unaware of the threads that bind. To exist in a place where the fine silken string that ties me and you, rock and heron, mud and star is rendered invisible. Blotted out by the noise. Swept away by the speed.

This shimmering thread makes and unmakes worlds. If you trace it with curiosity and attention, like Joshua Yeldham, you will rise to the moon and sink to the bottom of the river. You will climb mountain peaks and dissolve into the space between rock and sky. You will laugh and cry and draw and make and where you've been might best be described as a mystery. What is less mysterious is where the thread leads: It returns, always, to the earth beneath our soft-soled animal feet.

Yeldham's work is an act of tending and care, weaving and reweaving. See Surrender Tree. See how he wraps the ancient mangrove with line and light and the tenderest touch. Follow the bands of cane adorning the sinuous trunk, tapping into invisible energetic realms. Trace the strings running from node to node, lines of support and connection. Track the tiny, intricate marks carved and scraped and drilled into the tree trunks. See how the light – glistening and alive – emerges from the canopy, coaxed by Yeldham's hand. It is not enough only to imagine care. No, it is a physical act.

Now imagine, for a minute, being a spider. Climb to the highest point you can, raise your stomach to the sun and release your finest silken gossamer. Wait. Wait. Wait. Until the wind catches the thread and pulls you aloft, soaring skyward towards worlds unknown. Ballooning, it’s called, this act of trust in sky and silk. As illustrated in Fertility Tree – Morning Bay, it is an action of release and connection, weaving and unravelling. 'I've created my own language in the trees,' Yeldham says of the work. He talks of caress, how sometimes ideas and energies touch us in places quiet and hidden yet eternal. How a web is also an embrace.

Looping strands glimmer and dance in the iridescent light, linking branch to sky and beyond. Winding cane webs spiral softly in the wind. There is movement here. Energy here. Release here.

Surrender. Yes, surrender to the shimmering thread.

During Yeldham’s travels to Europe, “the Mediterranean landscape, marked by thousands of years of invasion, drought and contagion served as an elliptical echo. Yeldham was influenced by the tenacity of nature in the face of destruction . A gnarled tree in the stone garden of the Greek house bore a kindred lineage to the massive Monsteria that anchors the core of his own home. It was connections such as this that propelled a strong sense of both union and release:

“Art can rebuild your sense of place when there has been isolation. A lot of this show is about reaching out. It’ like a message in a bottle. Sending a signal out that we exist. Each place we stayed became a studio and it was perpetual. The art leaves a pulse, an imprint, a thread.”

The desire to join with ancient spaces and new terrains built a bridge out of watercolour paper. The drawings are raw, abandoning his signature finesse for something wilder and more immediate. The ritual of painting protective symbols upon dwellings is something he explored; Pinning his private talismans to bare walls, ravaged stone and trees and ‘tattooing’ public spaces with digital projections, the idea of marking the space was a core ritual. Brought home after time in Italy, Southern Spain and France, these studies inspired a fresh collection of carved clay sculptures designed to hold candles like a votive altar. Gathered together on sunlit tables they share a collective solidity. Replete. Carved like his photographs and paintings, the platters and bowls balance utility with ornament. Yet for this particular artist there is no such thing as ornament, as each marking is so critical to the whole.

In constant motion, it’s tempting to see the accomplishment of a mature artist as a reflex. But instead of leaning into his deepest grooves, Joshua Yeldham plunges into new mediums and finds relevant ways for them to cross-pollinate. “Garden of Ruins” is not a retrospective but a survey. For although chronology is not that useful in understanding such a diverse trajectory, a timeline from 2020 to the present is meaningful to everyone. Life hung suspended and not everything generated within that time could compensate for the loss. These years form an arc that remains vulnerable and raw because it is unfinished.

In that closed window of time one studio was singing a redemption song. But even the most exquisite works in this exhibition share a subtle undertow of shadow and collective doubt. The agency of creating was one artist’s survival tool, a force of budding against decay. “

-Anna Johnson

Yeldham and I speak about the body of work in which these pieces appear one afternoon, during the first Spring storm of the season and with the frightening memories of the 2020 fires still close to hand. This storm seems almost too perfect a setting in which to be having our discussion. Storms like these are both a rupture in the fabric of the day and an occasion for retreat into the safety of hearth and home. It’s along this path precisely – from rupture to return – that many of these recent works bring both Yeldham and his audience.

Erin McFadyen

Arts Writer & Deputy Editor of Artist Profile

Joshua Yeldham - Providence

5 November - 21 November 2020

66 McLachlan Ave, Rushcutters Bay NSW

Joshua Yeldham’s latest body of work was created in his studio on the Hawkesbury River following enlightening trips to Lord Howe Island in New South Wales and the Rocky Mountains in Colorado in the months before travel limits came into place. These pieces consider the protective care of nature as a spiritual power and highlight the refuge natural spaces have offered us this year.

“I trust in providence, the protective care of nature as a spiritual power.” – Joshua Yeldham

Joshua Yeldham - Child of the Storm

13 November - 7 December 2019

Opening night

13th of November 6-8pm - 909a High St, Armadale VIC

For Yeldham a painting is not a window onto the world but an instrument (sometimes even a musical instrument) that allows us to go beyond the visible. Ideally it’s also a tool for transformation, a vehicle for self-discovery…

Yeldham is a pilgrim, so enthused and stimulated by his quest that he can never visualise a destination. He’ll recognise it when he gets there - John McDonald, for Child of the Storm.

Scott Livesey Galleries - contact here

To view details about all works click here

Purchase Hard Cover Book/ 2019 Catalogue (Child of the storm) here

Wynne Prize finalist 2019

Title

Lion Island, Pittwater

Medium

acrylic on hand-carved board with cane

Dimensions

191 x 253.5 cm

Further information

I am a painter in the dark swell of Lion Island. My boat rolls past the lumps at Broken Bay’s mouth to the calm waters of Smiths Creek, with her cicadas drilling and her still water. I imagine I will send my paint brush roots down, and settle in.

Joshua Yeldham, 2019

Wynne Prize finalist 2018

Bay of sorrow – Hawkesbury River

acrylic on hand-carved linen paper

209 x 208.5 cm

I paint in my tinny. I carve with a belt sander the tides of the Hawkesbury and eat away like a termite into the raw linen, lifting pulp between the eucalypts. Near me is a midden of oysters thousands of years old in this bay that feels so empty.

Joshua Yeldham

Joshua Yeldham’s new collection ‘Endurance’ nurtures a space where boundaries collapse and binaries converge. Through his highly symbolic visual vernacular, the artist takes us on an inward odyssey inspired by recent travels throughout Japan, Arizona and India, as well as his ongoing affiliation with Australia’s Ku-ring-gai and Hawkesbury regions. Working across painting, kinetic and musical sculpture, carved works on paper and photography, Yeldham explores the shared threads that weave cultural ideologies, philosophies and religions across East and West.

For Yeldham, ‘Endurance’ is about ‘going beyond’; about breaching the borders of personal limitation. ‘The parameters placed on our lives are porous’, he says. Embellished with signature tapestries of cartographic carvings, organic pigments and hand-made instruments, the works assimilates Indian Vedic philosophies about the cyclicality of existence with the philosophical and pedagogical tenets of the Japanese archery, or Kyudo. He also reflects on Arizonian Hopi cosmology and the ritualistic tradition of the kachina. Through this, the works in ‘Endurance’ represent a coalescence of local and global; personal and collective; history and contemporaneity. Voyaging through Yeldham’s existential vignettes, we become passengers privy to the artist’s inner world.

Wynne Prize finalist 2017

Mother tree – Morning Bay

acrylic on hand–carved paper

210 x 210 cm

Over a period of 11 years, I have sat beneath a powerful grey mangrove in a remote lagoon near Pittwater, NSW. On thick hand-made paper, I have carved her trunk with a belt sander, digging through the ink to reveal her – a scarification of carved lines that build a bridge over the vast landscape towards my inner world.

Joshua Yeldham

The Rishi is regarded as a sage, one who sees with an expansion of vision. The wider spectrum of human life. I believe that we have higher conversations with ourselves in nature, directing us to our own wilderness and the ability to embrace change and mobilise us towards higher ground. 

- JY

Drawing from a reverential love of nature and deep spiritual affiliation with the land, Joshua Yeldham creates intricately rendered works that oscillate between narrative and myth, imagination and real experience. 

‘Owls of Kyoto’ marks an aesthetic departure from Yeldham’s renowned representations of the Australian wilderness, manifesting his inner imaginings along a recent journey to Japan. Fulfilling his long-time dream of creating art in Kyoto with his family, the artist’s unique hand carved prints are inspired by his travels, temple climbs and experiences harvesting Japanese indigo leaves. Allegorical representations of owls – significant animals in the symbolic currency of Japan, said to bring luck and offer protection from suffering – embody Yeldham’s profound and personal connection with nature. ‘These owls represent my need to merge with the natural environment’ he says; ‘they are loving owls, still and creative’. An ongoing source of inspiration, the owl allows the artist to submerge himself in the foreign environment of Kyoto on the wings of this familiar motif. Embellished with his signature patterning and free-formed carvings atop earthy pigments, the works signify his quiet communion with the natural world and willing surrender to forces that elude our control. The owls, believed by many indigenous cultures to be messengers and carriers of wisdom, deliver these deeply personal affiliations to the viewer.

Archibald Prize finalist 2013

Self-portrait: Morning Bay

instrument, cane, shells and oil on carved board

200 x 244 cm

‘All the elements in my Self-portrait: Morning Bay could be seen as representations of who I am: the owl, the mangrove tree, the instrument and the figures resting on the tree branch,’ says Joshua Yeldham. 

Yeldham’s work explores a spiritual connection to landscape. He now works on the Hawkesbury River. 

In this self-portrait, Yeldham says that: ‘the instrument describes a connection between science and nature, the melody that science played, surprisingly, in my own life when my wife and I were trying to have children through IVF. The owl, the tree and the instrument have been incredibly potent energies in my work over time, but they also change and shift in their meaning, just as the mangrove tree seeks stability in the mud.

‘In the figures there is a sense of myself as a developed creative force, but also a version of my young self, holding a brass bell, which is my link to the melodic, the creative: a very vulnerable form. On either side are two mysterious forms, which are probably my children. I didn’t consciously set out to include them in a self-portrait. But maybe they are so powerful that they decided for me!’

Born in Sydney in 1970, Yeldham has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Rhode Island School of Design in the US. He is represented in the Wynne Prize for the fourth time this year and has also been in the Sulman Prize twice.

Yeldham’s work is a mapping of multiple realities. It charts the artist’s travels among the mangroves, the disused oyster leases and along the salty foreshores near Pittwater. Yeldham’s cartography moves within this world and without. He is not limited by the materiality of reaching tree limbs or the muddy matter of swamps. His paintings and photographic works move beyond the human-perceived environment. Instead, he deliberates on the fragile spaces in between, the liminal places in his heart and mind where imagination soars and intellect sings. He says, ‘the space between two lines is what connects us.’

There is a graphic intensity to Josh Yeldham’s latest works that is rarely – if ever – seen in contemporary art. This is the work of both an obsessive artisan and a potent visionary. This is the stuff of dreams made solid, carved impeccably, stroke by miniscule stroke, tethering the smoky regions of memory and mind onto a solid surface.

Each of us will see our own dreams here. We will try and grapple with why these images seem so immediately recognisable and then realise we have never seen them before outside of somnambulistic flights of fantasy. We will think of the iconography of Eastern mysticism only to realise that this is a ruse – it may be an influence but these images are very much Yeldham’s own.

Of course they are not paintings per se. But nor are they sculptures as we have come to know that term. Technically these works are truly unique, beautiful hybrids of craft and vision.

Technically they are works by a youthful master.