Shipkeeping: Laine Groeneweg’s Sea Level
October 29 – November 23, 2016, Members’ Gallery, Centre[3] for Print and Media Arts, Hamilton, Ontario.
By Amanda Jernigan
Laine Groeneweg, Sea Levels, installation shot. Various mezzotint and drypoint prints, 2016. Photo by Laine Groeneweg.
Walking on a littered verge, you stumble upon them: battered, wave-abandoned sea wrack, these things are nonetheless recognizable to you, just — landlubber that you are — as objects of use. A life ring. A buoy. An anchor. A wheel.
Perhaps you have been on a boat, once. Perhaps you recognize these things as icons of seafaring, from the walls of tattoo parlours or the arms of those who frequent them. Or from your own arms. Or from books. Perhaps from books you read once in your childhood, children being natural mariners until it is bred out of them through time spent on land or in life or in school.
This is the world of Laine Groeneweg’s Sea Level, the exhibition that set up shipkeeping in the Members’ Gallery of Centre[3] through the month of November last year, beckoning viewers in from the street with its warm light and its familiar/unfamiliar imagery.
Along the south wall of the gallery, a series of portholes: circular mezzotints in gorgeously constructed round wooden frames. An octopus with a dinner-fork trident gets a death-grip on a horse (Poseidon); a sawfish faces off with a hammerhead shark (Saw & Hammer); a giant squid gores a tattooed beluga (The Squid & the Whale); a blue whale hides in a giant clam (Hide & Seek), a jellyfish in a Jif jar (Peanut Butter & Jellyfish). We are in a world that is one part Jules Verne (Several ships had recently met at sea “an enormous thing,” a long slender object which was sometimes phosphorescent and which was infinitely larger and faster than a whale…) and one part Christmas cracker (What do sea monsters eat for lunch? Fish and ships). The mixture of literal and figurative bathos was initially disorienting, for me — but it was glossed by the images on the facing wall: rectangular mezzotints, rectilinearly framed, some incorporating colour. We are back on land, here, looking out through the windows of dailiness, though at nautical scenes. These images restore a landlubber to her comfort zone, putting the undersea fantasias of the opposite wall into a context of play and childhood fascination. A narwhal impales the stacking plastic donuts of a toddler’s toy (Sea Unicorn and Rainbow); a pufferfish inflates a balloon (or vice versa?) (Rebreather); a boy pirate attacks (in)visible enemies from his pirate-ship bathtub (Give No Quarter); another child, in an old fashioned bathing costume and cap, prepares to dive into the open, illuminated pages of a book (The Dive). One conversation that is taking place in this body of work, then, is between adult and child.
I do not know Groeneweg well, but I have encountered him around town, and I knew he was a parent before I knew he was an artist. The biographical critic — or perhaps the parent — in me sees in these images an artist working through the kind of reimmersion in the foreign yet familiar element of childhood that one gets when one’s own children are aswim in it.
Another, overlapping conversation is evident, however. The interpretive material about this show tells us that Groeneweg is someone “who has seldom experienced [the sea] first hand”; his images are inspired as much by “dreams [and] folklore” as by “the landscape of the ocean” (wonderfully paradoxical phrase, that). So there is a conversation here between seafarer (the one who might make and/or use the anchor, buoy, life ring and wheel presented in the drypoint engravings of Nautical Studies, on the gallery’s west wall) and landlubber (the one who made these drypoints, in which the objects appear reverently isolated, as icons). This is in part a conversation between expert and layperson, and it is particularly eloquent for me in the context of Groeneweg’s work.
Laine Groeneweg, Saw & Hammer, platemaking process. Mezzotint copperplate, 2016. Photo by Laine Groeneweg.
Groeneweg is a layperson in the world of seafaring; in the world of printmaking, however, he is a master, his stunningly well-made mezzotints and drypoints proposing their own conversation between expert (him) and layperson (many if not most viewers of this exhibition). A viewer entering the gallery, like the beachcomber I described in my first paragraph, encounters — on a dark verge of black velvet in a lit display case — objects of use. These may, just, be familiar to her as tools of a printmaker’s trade — rockers and burnishers and copper plates, an engraver’s pad, a loupe — but they may also be as exotic as the tools of the seafaring trade presented in Nautical Studies.
My one, small regret about the exhibition: a notebook computer installed in the gallery, with process videos and other interpretive material, demystified these printmaker’s objects in a way that, for me, didn’t serve the exhibition — even though I was interested, non-initiate that I am, to learn how Groeneweg’s mysterious mezzotints came to be. It must be a constant wrestle for an artist who works in a once-common process that has become exotic (I think of the film-photographers that I know, here, too): how much do you need to educate your viewer about your medium, in order for her to understand the work? How much is the medium’s exoticism — its unfamiliarity and/or historical association — an integral part of the work, and something that deserves to be protected?
On my first tour through the gallery, the notebook computer was out of service (happily, as it turns out), and I encountered the exhibition without its intervention: it was this first, unmediated experience that shaped my most powerful impression of the show.
The analogy between ship’s master and master printer — the master printer being himself a non-initiate in the kingdom of the sea — sets up a dramatic tension between form and content in this work. For me, this raised the level of the exhibition, which continues to haunt me, leaving me chasing chains of connection and encountering zones of estrangement amongst artist and audience, landlubber and seafarer, and (as I said above) adult and child — this last a particularly poignant dichotomy for this viewer, who so often feels at sea as a parent of young children in this fascinating, menacing, marvellous world.
Amanda Jernigan is a grownup writer landlubber who is in love with childhood and printmaking and the sea. She lives in Hamilton, Ontario.
