Art close by

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Bodalla Gallery, Mechanics Institute (Moruya), SoArt Gallery (Narooma)

(Apologies to artists. This is my first such blog. Next time I’ll document names and attribute carefully.)

Although I live in the country, I’m surrounded by small galleries that feed my aesthetic hunger with a great variety of exhibitions, a manageable number of pieces and frequent changes. In the last few weeks I’ve visited three exhibitions and could have at least doubled that number by going a bit further afield.

All three galleries have reinvented the purpose of old buildings (the School of Arts in Narooma, the Mechanics Institute in Moruya and the back part of the Post Office in Bodalla) to create pleasant and accessible spaces.

At the Mechanics Institute I see an exhibition by the Eurobodalla Fibre and Textile Artists group. Silk coloured by onion skin and geebung bark floats with the movement of air. There are felt landscapes, large felt bowls, shoulder bags created from a variety of materials, sculptured 3D scarves and a few renegades consisting of twigs and lacquered pieces of lemon. A later Christmas sale of works made by the fibre artists fills one of the empty shops in Moruya and offers a rare opportunity to shop in the evening for something other than groceries.

At the exhibition in the recently-opened SoArt Gallery, diversity is marked. Local land and seascapes hang on stark white walls. Beautifully crafted dolls perch nonchalantly on columns. 3D pieces featuring feathers from an astonishing variety of birds showcase the design skills of nature and the artist, as well as the destructive capacity of human beings. Margaret Olley’s painting taught me deep apprecation of the possibilities of still life – my favourite here is conventional, except for an egg sliding over the edge of the table in an amusing tribute to Dali.

At the post office gallery in Bodalla, splendid photographs pay homage to local forests. Early light slants horizontal towards columnar trunks and across ferns. The whole coast and hinterland is laid out in a joined sequence taken from a helicopter. An echidna with gold tipped quills and a russet brush-back snuffles amongst the leaf litter near a rotting giant. Grand trees supporting vines and covered in moss tower on Gulaga mountain, survivors of the 2009 fires. My favourite is a black and white shot of buttress roots rambling across the forest floor, so rich that I look at it a number of times before I decide that it is indeed black and white and not the dim green subtlety of light beneath the canopy. However not all the photos are a celebration: one is an elegy, as the smoke puffs up and hangs thick in the air from a forestry log and burn.

The Bodalla Gallery is my favourite I think. Because it’s so close to home, I can pop in  to see the same exhibition a number of times, a treat I envied my friend when she worked opposite the National Gallery. A recent morning with Ellis Rowan and George Raper paintings and four visits to Fred Williams gave me a taste for slow art and this gallery indulges my desire for revisits and savourings.

Links to websites of some of the photographers represented in the Bodalla Gallery exhibition

Richard Green

Rob Blakers

Heide Smith

Gordon Undy

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Splitting hairs

Finally, a few weeks ago, we got around to playing with a plant key. Not only did it allow us to (almost) identify a headland wattle, but it opened up a whole new vocabulary. “Hairy” suddenly appeared hopelessly inadequate in the face of a cascade of near-synonyms, all with very specific meanings, splitting “hairy” into at least ten precise subspecies.

The vocabulary could be turned very nicely into a found poem.

HISPID

Ciliate,

pilose, pubescent

tomentose, tomentulous, ferruginous,

lannate.

GLABROUS

I delighted in this whole new world of words, and decided to buy a botanical dictionary forthwith. This is one occasion when Kindle and the internet won’t serve. I need a book on the table beside me, where I can reference page numbers and leaf through to my hairy heart’s content.

Hyacinth orchids: Dipodium punctatum

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Douglas Stewart, Eucalypts: a celebration

These orchids are the most resplendent and noticeable of all the species I’ve spotted so far.  A splash of pink on a tall scape against a spotted gum, sometimes up to my waist (I’m beginning the long journey to scientific measurement!), they can’t be missed. I’ve even spotted them from the car as I drive along the road into Potato Point.

However they are also the most recalcitrant to the camera. Somehow with them I lose my newly acquired mastery of depth of field. Good clear images of the splotched sepals guarantees a blurred labellum, and the luxuriance of blooms – up to 60 on a scape -often leads to photographic confusion and lack of focal point.

The photographer doesn’t have the luxury of the painter, who can gently relocate flowers in the interests of composition and clarity. To add to my catalogue of complaints, any idea of photographing the tall stems against the backgound of the bush is a delusion. I now sympathise with my father’s frustrated desire to photograph a white sheep on a green hill against the sunset. The real world doesn’t vouchsafe such things, except to the devout and devoted expert.

For the last few weeks I’ve made a short pilgrimage to a colony of hyacinth orchids near the house on the bush block where I spend weekends. They develop slowly, so I’ve managed to capture their progress from a tip, barely out of the ground,

to a tall scape with buds beginning to plump and reveal the characteristic speckles.

If I download a pile of disastrous shots, I only have to walk down past the clothesline for another attempt … and another … and another.

After two photographic sessions on the same day, and close examination of the plants in nature and on the screen, I suddenly realise that I am possibly visiting two species, not one. One lot of scapes is delicate and pale green; the other thick, almost woody, and maroon. This is exciting, but also a bit daunting, because it means I’ll need to expend ID energy again, and I thought I had this one nailed. Fortunately, there aren’t hundreds of cousins to choose from in this species.

My interest seems to augur doom for orchids. Fire took the greenhood; a tractor disappeared sun orchids and glossodias. And this is what I found on my last visit to the hyacinth colony –

the budding top of the scape neatly decapitated. This plant won’t continue through its cycle to seed pods.

As I rhapsodised in praise of Dipodium punctatum, I remembered that Douglas Stewart has written a number of poems about orchids. I tracked down hyacinth orchids in a poem called Aboriginal axe, and found this to undermine the glory:

Lovely and leprous, flushed and spotted /  The hyacinth orchid bloomed and rotted. 

I can handle rotted, but leprous is a bit hard to take. However he does restore some beauty in a later line:

The orchid stands up glowing and tall.

That however wasn’t the end of the dark side. Reading Eucalypts: a celebration  by John Wrigley and Murray Fagg  I found that hyacinth orchids are also hemi-parasitic. I’d noticed that they seemed to particularly enjoy the company of spotted gums (Corymbia maculata). Wrigley and Fagg tell me they grow in the leaf litter at the foot of eucalypts and use a fungus to link with their host so they can draw on it for sustenance. At least as hemi-parasites they bear some of the burden of their own life through photosynthesis.