It is an honour to share that my piece Resonance has been included in the 2023 National Gallery of Victoria’s Triennial exhibition. Covering all 4 levels of the NGV International, 120 artists, designers and collectives including the likes of Yoko Ono, Schiaparelli and Tracey Emin have come together from 30 countries.
Acrylic on hand carved pigment print on canvas on aluminium with cane, wood and string (2022), 8/9, 200 x 200cm.
“120 ARTISTS, DESIGNERS AND COLLECTIVES AT THE FOREFRONT OF GLOBAL CONTEMPORARY PRACTICE”- NGV
Extract from Conversations with Mangroves by Georgina Reid, published in the NGV Triennial 2023 Exhibition Catalogue
‘Magic, for me, was the realisation that in places where you're shrouded in shadow and darkness, you can start to see a vision of nature that is forever twinkling and changing as your consciousness changes, like a theatre of dim light, shape and form’, Yeldham says. ‘Faces come out of trees, creatures come out of the dark; but they come out equal to where your consciousness is at.’
We glide past a gnarled, mostly dead trunk lurching sideways, with a single skinny branch shooting up-up-up, culminating in an umbrella of fresh khaki green foliage. We loop back to look again. Cameras snapping in awe of a tree both dead and alive. A tree saying without words: The story of death and life has no beginning or end.
Deep in the sinuous channel carving the mangrove forest, language becomes sensory, ephemeral, beyond words. It is two white faced herons, still as statues, watching us from the highest branches of a dead tree; the puffy, glowing cumulus clouds gathering on the western horizon and whispering of rain; the water kissing the bow of the boat as we slide by.
Language, too, is an image of Joshua Yeldham carving light into a photograph of a grey mangrove downstream. The same tree he’s made art with for sixteen years. The old tree – maybe 150-years-old, maybe more – did not speak to him as a photograph. ‘It was foreign as an image on paper. It was separate to me and I wanted it to be me,’ he says of the origins of the work, Resonance.
To become mangrove, Josh began carving the surface of the image with a Dremel tool, ‘letting the tip of the grinder meander up through the bark over and over, as in a meditation.’ Each touch of the Dremel brought light. ‘I’m starting to make an offering. I'm starting to find illumination and reverence in something that I didn't fully connect to, which was just a static image. And then then I’m feeling that it was vulnerable, because I was falling in love with it. So I made these strings that are holding it together, in case a storm comes. To care and bind.’
But to create, care, love, is also to break, burn, destroy. In the 2016 book, Surrender, he writes:
I sand back the surface of the painting and in this destruction I allow areas of paint to collapse, and I lose control and stop searching for perfection. Letting go of stability, I seek out new patterns in the faded lines, a hint of fresh growth after the fire. A new sapling on the tip of my brush.
For Yeldham, intimacy with nature is not just creation (and destruction), it’s conversation – in the oldest sense of the word. Conversation, from the Latin conversari, meaning ‘to live, dwell, live with, keep company with’. He paints for hours in narrow channels, hemmed in by the tide. Sits for days on wind-formed sandstone rocks, high up on escarpments looking over the river. Some places tell him to stay, others to leave. He abides. Artworks are rolled up and stored under rock ledges until they are ready to be spoken with again.
He has mapped this place, not with measurements and co-ordinates, but with stories, memory and art. ‘Humans have always created narrative in landscape’, Yeldham says. ‘Nature can be overwhelming psychologically – we tell stories in order to ground ourselves, to manage our vulnerability.’ While his names for rocks and trees and river landmarks have endured, the memory of making the artworks always evaporates. ‘I've made hundreds of paintings up here. And my memories are of sitting idle, manifesting. The magical part is that I don’t exist. I don't have any memory of labour. I vanish.’
As we speak, as the sun sinks towards the horizon, I ponder the value of art in giving voice to what is yet to be spoken, what is not yet able to be scribed, what is obscured and de-enchanted by inherited words. Worlds are shaped by words, whether muttered, whispered, shouted, sung; words heard and unheard. Language, then, is always in question.
