27 November - 29 December Passing Through
Anie Nheu’s piece Passing Through is both an appreciation of
nature and a consideration of the appreciation of nature in art.
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It began during a holiday on
a farm at East Gresford beside Allyn River in the upper Hunter. Anie was struck by the
beauty of the landscape and the trees she saw. So much so that she began
drawing them, on this occasion a casuarina on the left and a eucalypt on the right.
Back in her Sydney studio and faced with the proposition of making something out
of her time away for SLOT, Anie focused on her drawing.
In a pile of some-one-else’s thrown-out junk she noticed an exquisite Art Nouveau frame, a style that celebrated organic form, in particular trees. It seems to have set the tone of Anie’s piece. Lovingly restored, it embellishes the rawness of the Australian bush with an orientalist elegance.
Like a giant piece of ikebana, a tree branch cut and re-assembled for the window space offers a counterpoint to the stylised representation of bamboo that frames Anie’s drawing of native trees - incidentally it is drawn in charcoal, the burnt fragments of trees, and is pointing out that the paper is pulped and processed timber taking the metaphor too far? Standing looking at the finished work I found myself thinking how many ways can you say tree in art? Anie commented that she saw it as commodification. She felt that the process of art is to make a commodity out of an experience. In this case the reverie found in nature. Sure, it’s not such a big thing, but in the hands of an artist it becomes that.
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This then is a meditation on our function in nature as much as it is a meditation on a couple of trees in nature. We commodify as Anie points out, we transform, process, consume and combust. It is our art. Our agency is vast and sweeping. We approach it with such urgency that few have a moment for pause as Anie does, to think widely while gazing at a couple of trees in a paddock on a farm up the Hunter.
Tony Twigg
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