EXHIBITION ESSAYS & ARTICLES

Exhibition: Angle of head 2006
Helen Maxwell Gallery at Silvershot, Melbourne

Bedrock principles – catalogue essay by David Hansen

In the protest era of the 1970s, it was said that "the personal is political". In the postcolonial 1990s the personal also became historical, as artists calibrated their own experiences with stories of family, community, region, race and nation.

Thus the broad arrows in Janenne Eaton's Penal colony series are not only emblems of the nature of Australia's first British settlement, but they also contain specific reference to the artist's own convict ancestry. Her explorations of war memorial avenues and of Chinese-Australian history come from visits to Ballarat, from tracing her Italian forebears who emigrated  to the goldfields.

Eaton also cites her training as an archaeologist as having had a significant effect on her art practice.  She recalls one particular epiphany: encountering a book of aerial photographs which "revealed a visual, temporal history of crop-growing patterns stretching back to the Bronze Age, moving forward again through Roman times, and so on into the present."1 Throughout her recent work there is a comparable compression of the past, or rather of numerous pasts, into a singularity of image or experience, a frame of presentness. (The obvious and often-used word is "palimpsest", though the cross-sectioning of an MRI scan would be an equally valid analogy.)

The notion of history and its different layers is embedded, too, in the methodology of painting.  It takes time to make time. Really. Work. Different parts of the process have different speeds, different gears. A quick spurt from a spray can for a point of light. A slower, steadier application for a dot-screen or an all-over black shine. A soothing snail's-pace of careful hand-painted dots to define the edges, contours and depths of image and text.

So what are we to make of Eaton's latest series of excavations? What can we read in the various habitation layers of these recent works?

Of course the fundamental grid structure derives from high modernist painting, from the purity and elegance of geometric abstraction. But it is as easily or as much a reference to low domestic crafts: quilts and eiderdowns. Even lower are the remembered linoleum tiles of a 1950s suburban interior. Here on the floor is the very horizon of painting.  In a number of the Penal colony works Eaton did not prepare her canvases with a smooth layer of gesso, but simply sealed them with Bondcrete, ensuring that the textile texture, the underside grid, the grit of the fabric weave itself was still discernible.  In these more recent works, she attends to slipperiness and gloss, to Handy Andy shiny lino, with the viewers own reflection creating disturbances, fissures and shadows in the flatness.

The dot-screen overlay (underlay?) has a similar richness of ambiguity. In evoking the pixels of screen media it is dead set digi-contemporary. There is even a suggestion of street cred, a nod to the current vogue for stencil graffiti. But it goes back in time, too: back to the monochrome nightmare of "smart bomb" film footage from the 1991 Gulf War; back to the grainy, snowy, indigo blur of television before 1975 (before colour); back to the dots of photomechanical reproduction in that agricultural archaeology photograph; back to the mercury moiré of the flyscreen door from the artist's Springvale childhood home; back even beyond her birth through generations of women's work in embroidery and lace.

More fields of meaning. Within the screen there are bigger, softer-edged white spots. A constellation of stars? The lights of the city at night? Spider's nests in the corner of the fly-wire? And are those rough ellipses clouds or cells or potatoes or a sci-fi movie encounter with an asteroid belt?

Finally, there are the words: "these people", "heart and soul", "nevertheless", "pissing in the river"… Such partial utterances run across and through and under the paintings' crossword boxes, their brevity and disconnectedness making them neither slogans nor aphorisms, but more like stifled complaints or muffled threats. The curt phrases balance meaning and emptiness, passion and platitude. In pictorial terms, it is testimony to Eaton's highly-tuned visual and conceptual sensitivities (and technical virtuosity) that she is able to hold the linguistic-textual content in humming tension with the abstract-formal surface. Neither element obtrudes. Neither side wins.

There is something deeply disturbing about these paintings, about having all these possibilities floating and blurring in front of our eyes. There is something almost claustrophobic, not-quite nauseating, ever-so-slightly repellent. Something existential, something that requires us to make a choice. Because these works represent the things that happen when you close your eyes, deny knowledge, deny responsibility. White spots. Darkness. Funeral bunting. Skull-and-bones. Nowheresville. Nothing.

Bedrock principles – catalogue essay by David Hansen 2006