Nicole Kelly

Solastalgia

ESSAY | Hazelhurst Regional Gallery | October 2022

The land is silent, breathless. Ancient boughs blackened by wildfire stand on their last legs, bodies spindly like strands of thread. Beneath them a charcoal bed, the resting place of the lost. Here are the bones of the bush, the cartilage of catastrophe; what’s left once flesh and foliage have been stripped away.

To love, and to grieve. Such is the deeply felt dichotomy in Nicole Kelly’s installation Solastalgia, where sizzling anxieties about climate crisis plough into a soft and tender love of the land. In her panoramic painting and ceramics, Kelly creates an empathetic space enacting the immersive ability of art to transport audiences from the physical and temporal limits of architectural space.

Kelly’s vast painted landscape – almost twelve metres long and two metres tall – references the catastrophic bushfires that blazed across south-eastern Australia in late 2019 and early 2020. Arranged circularly, this fourteen-panel piece recalls the Panorama paintings of the 19th century – yet rather than delineating sublime landscapes and grand historical events, it layers a burnt landscape with disorienting fragments of interior spaces and figuration. Rooms are cleaved open and left vulnerable to natural forces as interior spaces morph into the landscape itself, swiftly gutted by the climate-affected natural disaster. Potted indoor plants, green and lush, throw the scorched landscape into sharp relief, creating a collision between the cultivated and the wild and casting a sad shadow over the diminished future of ‘nature’. Silent is the scene, and yet the roar of the wildfire emanates in our collective memory. Within this surreal mashup of dichotomies, hunched figures avert their faces from the viewer, allowing us to transpose upon them our own affiliations. These are not portraits, indeed, but archetypes of sorrow. Amongst the faceless figures a singular young girl stands front on, her skin pale against the charred tree behind her. She is a spectre in a dead land, an apparition of innocence and life. Hope, perhaps, is not lost.

Trees in this installation are tropes of hope. Scorched boughs splinter the painted surface like cracks in the panels, their truncated branches reaching up to the sky in desperate supplication. Together these lineal forms appear arterial, circulatory, trailing up and down the composition with the heave of both life and death. Beneath the landscape, a blood red painted ground exposes itself like a shrouded wound in the negative space between trees, gesturing to the ecological trauma underscoring the Anthropocene. The vacant blue sky of Kelly’s painting pushes forward with osmotic force, as if wanting to ingest the parched forms. Yet the trees push back – defiant. They are scarred yet steadfast, a troupe of charred bodies standing like sentinels, soldiers, survivors. Far from a panorama of futility, this is a vista of hope. The strong verticality coined by the mass of tree trunks creates an urgent tugging downwards, towards the earth, towards the soil and the seed. Renewal. There is a certain compositional density here, a compression of space that consumes the viewer, while the weary trees encircling us watch on with a kind of panoptical omniscience. Surrounding the painted panels, 214 saggar fired ceramic trees line the parameter of the exhibition. These twisted and tormented limbs, rubbed with hues of burnt orange, dirty umber, ash white and charcoal, resemble ossified fragments of some prodigious skeleton. Literally born of fire, flecked and fortified by flames, they materialise the carbonised trunks in a way that speaks not only of tragedy, but of strength and resilience.

Throughout this installation – and indeed her oeuvre – Kelly engages with the fragment, the synecdoche, to create a coded space for gentle cogitation. There is something unshakingly poetic to this pictorial strategy. Solastalgia does not conjure the beauteous forms of Wordsworth, nor the Romantic lyrics of Keats, but the doleful, fragmented images painted by modern thinkers like T. S Eliot. When moving inside Kelly’s painted space, and around the parameter of the tree-lined exhibition space, the viewpoint shifts, imagery falls apart, slips in and out of focus and appears incomplete. Optical tremors spawn uncertainty, doubt, the provisional and the unfinished as we step, metaphorically, into an era of environmental unknown. The paintings themselves act as a counterpoint to representation as Kelly employs various methodologies that fight against the image. Veiling and camouflage are induced by layers of paint scraped back, erased and obfuscated, as well as lumps of congealed paint buried beneath lavishly loaded surfaces. Deliberately effaced edges mingle with crude sketching, giving rise to visual slippages where crevices between forms collapse into each other, contorting any representational logic. Secrets are sewn into the work, offering the promise of enlightenment whilst also shining light on our collective ignorance. The trees know all, the trees have seen it all – they look to us for help yet despair at our inaction. Within Kelly’s painterly stratification is a spatial and temporal splintering, a clever turbulence that prevents the eye from sitting still or resting on a vanishing point. Observation, here, becomes excavation as we untangle meaning from mark, and form from fragment.

In the years following Australia’s 2020 bushfires, collective grief and subsequent discussion about land practices forced many Australians to not only consider how precious and vulnerable the environment is, but also how endemic mismanagement continues to influence and change the landscape. Solastalgia occupies a place in the ongoing question of how we represent our changing and sensitive relationships with the landscape. Kelly’s fluency with paint, along with the immersive nature of her work, steers the viewer through confronting terrain, seducing our eyes before delivering dense cognitive content. With almost life-sized figures looming in the foreground of her painting, the artist positions anthropogenic activity as a catalyst of crisis whilst also situating humanity as a bastion of hope – the planet’s only hope. This idea is unwittingly performed by the viewer of Solastalgia, for as we actively explore the static installation our agency is reflected back, brightly. We are agents of change, and the earth is moaning for help.