The Poetic Lens opening speech – Kim Mahood
Installation shot of Poetic Lens exhibition featuring the work of Genevieve Swifte in the foreground
We were most fortunate to have artist and writer Kim Mahood open our exhibition and kindly share her speaker's notes with us. Below is a transcript of what she said:
I’m delighted and honoured to be asked to open this exhibition. Having known most of the artists since their student days, it’s immensely satisfying to see their work and their practice develop in such exciting directions. They belong to a constellation of fantastic Canberra artists who are making work and building careers under the umbrella of a local art scene that is both supportive and critically challenging.
It’s also great to see the model they are developing as a group, to share skills and resources, to support each other and maintain a professional collegiate relationship. It’s easy to become isolated once you cut the umbilical cord with art school, and isolation can lead to loss of momentum.
But loss of momentum is not a problem for these artists. Between them they have an astonishing list of achievements –exhibitions, residencies, awards.
The Poetic Lens. What a great title. I believe it was coined by Genevieve. It perfectly describes the way in which the four artists have used the camera as the poet’s eye, to capture that shimmering ambiguity that is contained in all good poetry.
What is interesting is how differently that ambiguity is reflected in the work of each of the artists.
At first glance Genevieve Swifte’s work is striking in its formal restraint, until you realise how tactile the images are, like embossed velvet, and that there’s an almost baroque sensibility embedded in them. Can you have baroque restraint – restrained baroque?
Ellis Hutch’s luminous spaces have a saturated emptiness, a lush minimalism. To see the northern lights in the green flare on a kitchen ceiling in Queanbeyan is the mark of a poetic imagination.
The sensory overload of Blaide Lallemand’s New York is punctuated with intervals of contemplative stillness, a soft focus, meditative hum that counterpoints the claustrophobic urban noise.
Caroline Huf’s videos manage an astonishing balance between intimacy and alienation.
Like a good poem, or any successful work of art, the meanings hover and shift, depending on who’s looking, and where you’re looking from.
What the poetic lens has observed and recorded in all these works is an embodied, sensory quality of place. They are as much about sensation as they are about seeing, whether the place is somewhere exotic and new, or as familiar and domestic as a suburban bedroom. The strange is made familiar and the familiar is made strange.
I’ll leave the last word on that to the artists, who have made a pretty fair hand of poetic text as well –
noticed only when it returns
sometimes its presence before the absence
only becomes apparent on its return
(Quoted poetry by Caroline Huf)
For more on Kim Mahood there's a lovely interview with Irma Gold here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ds-EaTZ3zH4
