Black Sun, Bright Shadows John Neylon, an Adelaide-based independent art writer and curator, January 2009
There is a turning point when the need to make art begins to take over everything else. For Pamela Kouwenhoven it was around 1990, almost thirty years after first going to art school. It had been a long circuitous journey. As a child growing up in the remote township of Lock on South Australia's West Coast, there was no local gallery, art in the home or the local primary school to inspire a young imagination. Perhaps, she recalls, it was simply a moment, watching a shearer drawing a cartoon that sparked the idea. Secondary schooling in Adelaide gave her the experience of 'doing art'. Again a chance experience, a suggestion that she might consider art teaching, largely determined a direction she would follow for the next ten years. Art teaching paid the bills for a growing family. But Kouwenhoven continued to harbor what she describes as a 'deeply held desire to be an artist.' As a tenured art-teacher trainee, studying first at the South Australian School of Art (SASA) in the old Exhibition Building on North Terrace and later at the new SASA site at Lower North Adelaide her desire to be an artist grew. It wasn't just the fashionable street style of the 'fine art' students, the jeans, long hair, black tights and the smoking that fired her ambition. With her then partner Theo Kouwenhoven she spent close to four years in Europe in the early 1970s, travelling widely and always spending time in major galleries, particularly in The Netherlands and also in London, Paris and Athens.
By 1976, back in Adelaide, living in Littlehampton in the Adelaide Hills and now a full time parent, the dream of being an artist was kept alive by undertaking a series of TAFE courses in such activities as leather work, textiles and enamelling, followed by certificate courses in drawing and painting. It was satisfying to a degree but privately Kouwenhoven felt as if she 'was drowning'. In 1987 Kouwenhoven resolved this impasse by going back to Art School and completing in 1989 an Associate Diploma in Art.
Kouwenhoven marks 1990 as the beginning of her public career as an artist. Her plan was to implement the age-old artists' strategy of seeing if 'commercial' work could subsidise more experimental studio practice. 'Commercial' work took the form of predominantly mixed media, paint and pastel landscapes on paper, in which the artist experimented with a loose expressionist style. This line of work, which proved popular and attracted some critical success (notably the inaugural 1997 Heysen Prize) continued until around 2000 when the small malthoid 'Australian Dry Landscapes' effectively replaced this line of work.
While at art school, Kouwenhoven realised that her initial dream of becoming a 'serious painter' was not to be. A course exercise involving the use of wooden pegs to explore symbolism triggered an interest in related lines of investigation and in particular, 3D assemblage. From this came a series of works titled 'Boxed In' with clothes pegs symbolically representing 'woman'. Kouwenhoven later commented that at this time (in her mid 40s) 'I was questioning who I was and where my life was taking me. Although I didn't realise it at the time, they were structured around and were about my search for identity.' In 1989 and 1990 a number of these peg and plaster assemblage works (wall and free standing) appeared in local (Adelaide) and touring exhibitions (Himeji, Japan and Christchurch New Zealand).
The artist reflects that the period of (1990 - 1995) was important in terms of taking time out to explore directions beyond painting. Basically this exploration took the form of 'finding stuff and assembling it together.' Technically the work was mixed media; found objects and plaster casts. In 1992 she received an Arts SA grant for research and development into plaster casting and mould making. In her grant application Kouwenhoven explained that the technique she was using was fitting in the sense that 'my work deals in part with woman, and how they are 'boxed in' or 'squeezed into moulds' and the breaking out of that mould.'Memory, loss and mourning
From 1990 to the mid 1990s the artist's practice revolved around the big themes of memory, love and loss. While at art school Kouwenhoven had taken plaster casts of old headstones as part of her research into the artistic use of angels. Her search for materials and ideas led her increasingly to haunt graveyards, principally smaller sites around the Adelaide Hills. She found her attention slipping away from gravesites to rubbish collected in bins; abandoned bereavement cards, ribbons and particularly, plastic flowers, 'weeded out' as too worn or faded for further use. One of the first significant works to appear within this period, Soul Searching, 1991, was accepted for the 1991 Blake Prize. This almost 2 metre long work was composed of a line of photocopied angel images glued to an embossed surface, under which was a line of massed plastic flowers that had been lightly sprayed with white paint. Positioned at each end were wings made from white (turkey) feathers.Stimulus to continue this line of investigation came in the form of a Frieda Kahlo exhibition seen at the Art Gallery of South Australia during the 1992 Adelaide Festival of Arts. Kouwenhoven's tribute work, Memories & Tears - F.K. was a mixed media, collaged work designed as if a reliquary (or as the artist describes, 'like a little doll's house mounted onto the wall' with photocopies of nine Kahlo self portraits flanked by hinged panels of massed plastic flowers. The artist's comment at the time, 'I work with symbolism and continue to explore the theme of identity, inner freedom, and the legacies, we as women have inherited through the ages: The past provides a key, allowing us to unlock and search among ourselves,' [1] was a clear indication of an intent to explore the metaphoric potential of her assemblage-based practice.
This intention was plainly evident in the artist's first solo exhibition, Beyond Boundaries, Art Zone Gallery, 1993. By this time Kouwenhoven had been taking extensive plaster casts from headstones, an extension to the photographs taken in Adelaide's West Terrace cemetery, the previous year. Various formats were used; photocollages of tombstone monuments and casts inside perspex boxes and wall panels. A store dummy provided the basis for a number of plaster torsos, a number encased in perspex boxes. This was a very 'white' exhibition; painted plaster torsos and grave-site ornaments; white flowers and birds' feathers coated in (white) plaster. With titles including The Angel Within and Beyond Glass Ceilings, critical response was alert to political messages. Critic Adam Dutkiewicz considered that such titles established 'the thematic territory. The motivation comes from Kouwenhoven's perception of women and their roles in life and of the people behind their presentation.' [2] Another critic, Stephanie Radok, picked up on the funeral and bridal resonances, 'the bride, one role of women, seems equated with the end of the line.' [3]
Myrana Wahlqvist, in her catalogue essay commented that the artist's work 'has a strong appeal for many women, Its enigmatic and mysterious evocation of deep inner forces strikes a significant chord with women, whose busy modern lives have a timeless longing at the centre. Her angel/goddess works not only represent, but somehow bring to life, the archetypal goddess within us.' The artist's statement , 'this work is not about death but about finding ourselves in life - about the struggle to become real from within - about the world beyond the glass ceiling, about striving, reaching out using our wings,' supports these interpretations. [4]
From the mid 1990s to the early 2000s Kouwenhoven continued to explore themes of memory, love and loss, acted out against a backdrop of personal loss (particularly the death of her mother in 1994) and to find inspiration in the visual language and symbolism of cemeteries. Two solo exhibitions effectively marked the closure of overt funerary-referenced work. Memory, Love & Loss, at the New Land Gallery, 2000, explored related themes using floor and wall installations of found silk flowers, found and plaster cast objects as seen in Shrine to Memory built from discarded artificial (memorial) flowers and plaster casts of clasped hands with the central composition defined by the hand units arranged into a cross formation. One particular work, Love, paid homage to the artist's mother. Within a perspex vitrine containing discarded and dirt-soiled fabric roses and ribbons was placed a remembrance card from her funeral service. Above a plaster relief handshake on the plinth was a brass plaque engraved with the word 'LOVE'. The artist commented at the time that, 'For years I have been salvaging discarded artificial floral arrangements from cemeteries, at first I really didn't know what I was going to do with them, I just thought they were beautiful offerings and they shouldn't be thrown away.' Exhibition notes mentioned that the artist was drawing on her visual experiences of offerings at temples in Bali. They also referred to an aspect of the artist's work which has remained central to her practice, namely the potential of discarded objects, to be 'reborn'.
The 2002 Light Square Gallery exhibition, Bye & Bye saw the artist make extensive use of a shrine motif as seen in White Shrine, composed as two clasped hands (a favourite Victorian-era symbol of eventual re-union with a loved one) perched on a multi-tiered wedding cake-like structure and Black Shrine featuring a three-tiered wedding cake ornamented with astro turf icing and metallic ribbon shavings. Memorial Garden pushed the emotional buttons by including within a mass of discarded bouquets and salvaged cards of remembrance. Viewers were invited to use blank cards provided to write and insert their own sentiments. In Memoriam was composed of individual roses and carnations from a disassembled heart shaped wreath found by the artist half-buried in pile of rubbish. Using the wire which originally bound these flowers into the wreath, Kouwenhoven arranged them in a linear danse macabre along the gallery walls.Emma Zakarevicius, in her review of this exhibition read in to the artist's act of salvaging a reinstatement of the objects' 'validity and importance, despite their imperfections and weathered appearances. By inviting us to respect and pay homage to life, Kouwenhoven broaches a difficult subject in a passionate and heartfelt way. These shared sentiments of remembrance not only preserve the memory of the individual, it forces us to confront our own unresolved grief.' [5]
A fossicker by nature
Parallel to mixed media work exploring the big issues of life, Kouwenhoven had continued to interpret landscape through painting. Where the idea to do this through found materials came from she is not sure. Certainly the principle of found objects (particularly those with an interesting 'history') having symbolic properties was by the early 2000s embedded in her practice. Kouwenhoven exchanged the cemetery for the local rubbish dump and continued as before, scavenging interesting stuff in the form of rusted metal and other items. As she explains, 'I'm a fossicker by nature.'
Deeper, darker, crustier
I really feel that I have found my voice. I know without any doubt that this is what I want to do. [6]
Around 2000 Kouwenhoven was developing an extensive body of practice built on the use of discarded industrial materials, particularly scrap metal and machine components. The artist was intent on finding a way to create 'really original' landscape works. A number of works made at this time, sourced from the local Windmill Hill recycle centre near Hahndorf, were constructed from the corroded inside metal of tank bases, glued to board and framed under glass. Kouwenhoven comments that the rich yellows of the soft, powdery oxides had the qualities of pastel and the appearance of 'paddocks of ripened wheat.' While collecting such material from a site near Windmill Hill, the artist happened on an old corrugated iron tank, collapsed and rusting into the ground. As the body of the tank was lifted the base was revealed. It was a small epiphany. Kouwenhoven found herself looking at an extraordinary set of textures and patterning. She comments, 'I was excited immediately. I knew that this was something. It was real landscape in the sense that it had 'lived' in the land.' The process of working directly with the material as opposed to creating 'landscapes', the artist found 'really meaningful'.
The trigger which really attracted the artist's interest was malthoid. Malthoid is a bitumous-based waterproofing membrane traditionally used to protect iron water tanks from rust. With aging and the action of scraping sheets of this material from the tank's base, a rich catalogue of patterns and textures was created; something which Kouwenhoven instinctively realised could be exploited to extend the metaphoric content of her imagery. She continued to actively seek out old, abandoned tanks and harvest malthoid 'lodes'. Sheets of this material were stockpiled and eventually found their way into an ongoing series of 'landscapes' consisting of framed sections of malthoid sheeting. This project sparked other forms of exploration. The protean character of the material prompted the artist to investigate the possibilities of other 'elemental' materials in addition to bitumen, including ash, paint, earth and other organic material.
Working with the medium posed challenges apart from the hard physical work of scraping sections then storing slabs of heavy and dirty malthoid sheeting. The artist learnt early on not to try to mix the malthoid units with other visual elements or materials. She recognised that there was no need for 'her own work' to be included. It would be all about selection. On this art critic Margot Osborne has written, 'Her minimalist intervention as an artist is to decide where to place the frame. This framing (literally cutting the malthoid in a rectangular form and mounting it on an mdf panel) relies on her intuitive sense of balance and design, her rapport with the medium. For it is the framing that reveals for the viewer this imaginative association with the weathered landscape, through accentuation of the tonal and textural nuances inherent in the random patterns of ageing and corrosion.' [7]
Kouwenhoven knew that she was 'onto something' and continued to attract queries from artists curious about the process that had produced such etched-like images. She initially felt comfortable working within small scale rectangular formats, using complete or part sections of malthoid surfacing glued onto board. By leaving the upper section of selected panels clear, a 'horizon line' was created thus creating small 'landscapes'. Of this strategy artist-curator Ken Orchard has commented, 'By placing the edge of the horizon high, the artist has allowed the flat surface of her materials to have a double life, retaining the verticality of its unaltered material substance - encrusted, pock-marked, like the withered skin of a dried out reptile - while at the same time functioning as a plain that recedes strongly away from the eye to a distant horizon.' [8]
By 2003 Kouwenhoven's approach to manipulating and formatting malthoid sheet units had increased in confidence. This involved experimentation with more free-form, compositional alternatives to chessboard grid formats particularly in the juxtapostioning of irregular shapes. One such work, Arid Lands, was awarded the 2003 Heysen Prize for Australian Landscape amid some local (Hahndorf) controversy concerning the work's credentials as a 'landscape'. Further experiment involved irregular sections of malthoid sheeting being glued to canvas panels. Parallel to this Kouwenhoven produced a number of larger panels composed as chess-board grids as seen in Coober Pedy Landscape which featured in the 2004 Adelaide Festival Universal Playground. This large work (120cm x 240cm) incorporated scraps of wire, units of rubber and other salvaged industrial items set on and within square units of malthoid and metal surfaces.
Tanks
At some point, and certainly by 2006, the emblematic identity of the water tank asserted itself within her imagination. At a time increasingly dominated by debate and anxiety within the South Australian and wider Australian community about drought, and water use and environmental sustainability, the humble water tank ( albeit in a contemporary poly plastic guise) reasserted itself in the public imagination as a symbol of responsible action. The malthoid-base works had always resonated with 'sun burnt/parched land' allusions. But the artist's use of a tank as central motif signaled a shift in thinking. The hunt for old, abandoned iron water tanks was on in earnest and at every opportunity Kouwenhoven secured and with the help of friends, 'rescued' a number of tanks from oblivion. An aspect which particularly attracted her imagination was that many tanks at the end of their useful lives had been deliberately mutilated, usually punctured and crushed flat. With the air out of them they weren't going to fly anywhere. Around 2006 Kouwenhoven made a series of decisions to foreground this source of inspiration. Investigation took a number of directions. By cutting the bases from selected tanks, Kouwenhoven created large (over 2 metres in diameter) disc or oval forms. Hung on expansive gallery walls, these multi-textured and coloured ovoid forms commanded strong visual interest. Lines of demarcation (created by pressure, crumpling or folding of the tanks), along with random colour blooming and texturing resulting from corrosion over time, added additional compositional complexity and implied that the artist had intervened to create satisfying aesthetic passages. The satisfaction for Kouwenhoven lay in the fact that the forms were completely 'found'.From 2006 Kouwenhoven had been collecting complete tanks and installed a few on her front lawn while considering where this might lead. Sub Artesian Basin, presented at the 2006 Confluence exhibition at the Murray Bridge Regional Gallery (part of the Palimpsest program), was the first complete 'tank' to be exhibited. A wall work, Murraylands Palimpsest, also included in this exhibition, was acquired by the Art Gallery of South Australia in 2007. Kouwenhoven also contributed a tank-work, Anamnesis, to the 2008 Palmer Sculpture Biennial. Set on a wind swept and rock-studded hillside this work adopted the disguise of a ruined tank farm and thus alluded to prior settlement and abandonment. Of this work the artist comments, 'Anamnesis stands as a recollection of our history revealed through its relationship with the Land. Like the pages of a journal, its surfaces record the passing of time. The melding of the metal and earth mark (s) the traces of these interchanges, as we press on the earth, so the earth responds in kind. Above all, Anamnesis is a poetic reminder of the inescapable cycle of life and death, decay and renewal.' [9] A large crushed tank was exhibited in the Terra Spiritalis exhibition at the Murray Bridge Regional Gallery in early 2008 where display lighting highlighted forms and ribbed profiling evocative of ancient landforms. Water placed for the duration of the exhibition in a section of the tank appeared to reference half-empty dams and shrinking river flows.
A number of Dryland Base series works featured in the Dryland exhibition of the artist's work, at the University of the Sunshine Coast Gallery, 2008. In the catalogue essay for this exhibition Karen Zadra wrote, 'The tank works have developed out of Kouwenhoven's exploration of malthoid. They, too, retain the memory of land and our unquenchable thirst for water. With little surface water available in the dry country, tanks are a life-support system for the settlers and their livestock. The presence of these cut down tanks creates a compelling tension, juxtaposing the hard rigid metal with the soft pliable malthoid, which in turn mimics the environment in which they had stood for decades.' [10] This exhibition included other large scale works composed as free-form compositions of irregular units of malthoid sheeting fixed onto rectangular panels.
Charge it
Collection of found objects and materials has not been restricted to tanks and malthoid sheeting. Although, it could be argued, that in collecting discarded wet-plate battery casings, the artist has remained within the orbit of 'post-industrial 'or recycled containers. Kouwenhoven came across a pile of abandoned battery cases at a local dump, likely to have been there for around twenty years. Most had been broken and shattered in the course of the inner lead sheeting being extracted. The colour of the outer casings had been faded to soft pinks, yellows and greys by the action of sunlight. She commented later that they were like the faded flowers she had found in grave-yards. Some casings deeper down in the pile retained much of their original bright coloration. As with her sheets of malthoid, Kouwenhoven piled them up in her studio, within sight. She began sawing them into sections and rearranging the units in a spirit of experiment. The outcomes of this extended period of experimentation featured in a 2006 exhibition of new work at the Prospect Galley. Most were wall reliefs composed of units of battery casings fixed side by side, with their inner broken surfaces facing outwards. These works were complemented by several photographs of off-cuts and fragments of casing. Writer Paula York's catalogue notes commented that 'Constructed of battery cases reprised in the slow process of their decay, the work sparks reflection on our reckless spending of natural resources.' [11] Ian Hamilton, also writing in the catalogue, picked up on this perspective, 'If the colours reflected the Australian landscape, the faded names on the cases certainly did not. Trojan, Atlas, Vesta, Aurora These were ancient names from another part of the world and another history. Other more modern names like Autolite, X-Press, Dynapak spoke of more recent histories and of brash optimism (how the mighty fall!).' [12]One critical perspective focused more on the openness of the visual metaphors, 'Assembled in groups and displayed on clean white gallery walls these cases take on a new persona. One becomes aware of the strange beauty they possess; a combination of the nuances of colours, the weathered textures and the profiling of the shattered outer edges which gives from a side on view, the impression of a Polar landscape of smashed and colliding sheet ice. [13] But the similarity may not be entirely serendipitous. The use of recycled industrial materials in art practice has often been underscored by environmental perspectives and while it seems natural to want to align this body of work with the Zen aesthetic assemblages of an artist like Rosalie Gascoigne, the fact that we are looking at the carcasses of gutted power packs does skew the viewing. From a slightly darker perspective (and a side-long glance across the shattered upper edges of the casings) something approaching an apocalyptic vista of smashed and abandoned cities comes into focus.' [14]
Critical readings
In art as life, context defines everything. The era of the late 1980s and early 1990s in which Kouwenhoven was making her plastic flower shrines and plaster assemblages was seduced by the promise of installation as a dynamic strategy to encapsulate and communicate personal journeys of self discovery. The over-reliance on found objects to do the heavy lifting in terms of memory triggers and emotional response created a reflexive culture of aesthetic and conceptual predictability that gradually saw installation per se marginalised by the later 1990s as an automatic option for many contemporary artists. Kouwenhoven successfully rode this wave like so many others. But had she continued her 'dried' (plastic) flower arrangements it is doubtful if her practice could have retained its original freshness and vigor. The instinctive shift to harvest and work with more elemental, less literary or overtly narrative materials, particularly the malthoid sheeting, re-positioned her practice in a new context. Initially this context appeared to be modern era Australian landscape. Her viewing audience for the smaller 'horizon line' landscapes was immediate. It easily categorised such works as a kind of landscape as pioneered by the likes of Fred Williams and subsequent generations of Australian landscapists. It was built on one of the favourite tropes of modernism, the vertical plane both leading the eye into the image while at the same time creating a wall on which compositional elements and marks could be arranged at will. The dark earthy tones compounded the attraction and its association with 'elemental' arid landscapes. Had this context remained and Kouwenhoven stayed in a holding pattern it is likely that with time her work might have been subsumed into a broad subset of modern Australian landscape art which included not only the 'bare-bones' landscapes of Williams, with their nod to Chinese brush painting conventions but also to the texture painting trend in 1960s Australian art, influenced by Spanish artists, notably Tapies, and best-known through [the such]? as the heavily-textured works of the Australian artist, Elwyn Lynn. [15]
But the context changed. Sustained drought across many regions in Australia in the first decade of the 21st century, triggered debate in the broader community about sustainable use of dwindling water resources. In one of the worst-affected regions (and Kouwenhoven's home state) South Australia, conservation-referencing became increasingly embedded within the practice of a number of artists usually in the guise of celebrating or raising awareness of fragile environments and threatened species extinction. Around 2006 Kouwenhoven became involved in a number of artistic programs which emerged from within this renewed spirit of activism and environmental concern. The Palmer Sculpture Biennial and Palimpsest projects have been particularly successful in reflecting the diversity of this body of practice. [16] While some artists have foregrounded environmental issues, others, including Kouwenhoven, have had a different set of agendas. In Kouwenhoven's instance this may be best summarised as 'relationship with land'. Not any land; arid or semi-arid landscape. The kind of land the artist grew up with on the West Coast of South Australia, dry, bare-boned, even unforgiving but possessing for those who can sense it, a unique beauty.
On the question of core intentions in making art works Kouwenhoven has repeatedly commented that she intends to make works which 'reflect the dry Australian landscape.' Critical assessment of her work needs to proceed from this point and focus on the reasons for attraction to dryness and aridity rather than look for some agenda which tends to align the artist's work with conservation-referenced practice. That said, the artist has commented that, 'It seems timely, in the context of the present day issues about water and drought which are dominating the news at a national level, that the focus of my work has been, and continues to be, dry lands and the part that water plays.' But Kouwenhoven has also stated that in developing her work, she feels that she works instinctively but accepts that 'what people begin to say about it allows me to see things - such as my work representing dry land - that I hadn't noticed before.'
It is the artist's sustained use of rainwater tanks (and associated malthoid rust proofing) which has more recently skewed the reading and positioned her practice closer to overt enviro-political statement. Thus her malthoid sheet panels of the early 2000's were read as 'metaphors for a parched land.' [17] In 2008 her tank-based work was being interpreted as whispering of 'the struggle successive generations have had with the land that resists cultivation and civilisation beyond the city fringes; the fraught battle for survival in a place that is simultaneously harsh and deceptively fragile.' [18]
On balance, critical assessment of the artist's work has favoured interpretations built around the idea of creating a particular aesthetic which acts as a filter through which viewers read their own recollections and responses to arid landscape. For example, art critic Stephanie Radok has written that 'Like the art of Rosalie Gascoigne, it (Kouwenhoven's work) seizes on the language of textures created by time and weather and removing it from the sky and wind isolates it in a gallery, a white space which then seems invaded by breaths of that sky and that wind.' [19] Inevitably, it is impossible to separate subject and expression and it seems that Kouwenhoven's work functions as both a trigger for personal recollections with specific landscapes as well as more open-ended kinds of responses. This layered interpretation can be seen for example in Karen Zadra's reading of the artist's tank base panels, 'In contemplating these works, we allow ourselves to reflect on our own connections to the land and to ponder the schismatic nature of Australia: fragile-resilient; barren-abundant; harsh-beautiful.' [20] Another critic Margot Osborne has suggested that, 'In this unwanted detritus Kouwenhoven has found a microcosm that reflects the macrocosm.' [21]
'What I endeavor to do is refine, refine, refine.'
Pamela KouwenhovenThe touchstone in this process is the integrity of the artist's response to subjective experience. Kouwenhoven has commented that 'I don't even think of my work in the context of landscape.' In an intriguing twist, Kouwenhoven's methodology, aligned with the use of elemental 'of the earth' materials has become in itself a metaphor for the forces and processes which have shaped the land she reflects on in her work. Kouwenhoven has commented, 'What I endeavour to do is refine, refine, refine.' Looking at the bare-boned, laconic grammar of her style this verb 'refine' could be taken as code for 'erode' or 'strip away.' Not only has the artist continued to strip the forms and compositions to bare essentials but the very act of manipulating found materials has sometimes been rationed to the barest gestures. More recently this has meant minimal interference as seen in the crushed tanks, salvaged from a farm dump and relocated as an art work (Anamnesis) in the 2008 Palmer Sculpture Biennial. This act represented an end point to the artist's qualification to her intention to 'refineso that there is nothing in the work that doesn't need to be there.'
Retrieval
With Kouwenhoven's dialogue with deep time and vast space hovering on the edge of the metaphysical it is useful to remember that the artist considers herself grounded in real time and space. She grew up on a farm. Hard land. Tough life. Life was measured by work. Hard work. Everything had a use and you had to become useful, despite being a girl in a man's world. Nothing was wasted or thrown away. Farm dumps were timeless supermarkets for recycled materials. To this day, the artist comments that she 'has made things hard for herself.' Even sourcing her materials, scouring dumps and stripping the malthoid sheeting involves hard physical labour. It is a pattern she cannot fully explain. Nor is it possible for her to fully explain her interest in the ageing process. The ageing and death of parents is a rite of adult passage which is to a degree self-explanatory. But where does her instinctive need to collect 'rubbish' such as dumped plastic flowers or battery casings come from? Or to reference 'discarded' arid landscape not fit for farming or starved of water? Interest in the poetics of the everyday is a constant element which can be partly explained by an attraction to Japanese Zen Buddhist perspectives. There are parallels between Kouwenhoven's practice and that of a Japanese sumi-e artist discovering the forms pre-existing in nature and seeking the essence of the subject through the least possible means. From this perspective the artist's body of work embodies a haiku spirit of a celebration of the commonplace or the marginalised. At another level it appears to reference in its celebration of the old, worn and discarded, qualities of Japanese traditional wabi-sabi. This also accords with the artist's own belief in the capacity of objects to be 'reborn.'
That said, the work, particularly that of the last decade, but also central to earlier, cemetery-sourced sculptures and installations, has its dark side. The most recent series, a set of charred paper rolls, sited in the landscape like Indigenous pukimani funerary poles [22] re-opened this dwelling on mortality. In writing on some malthoid 'landscapes' I previously observed that, 'it was possible to read these images as carefully-realised expressions of primordial landscapes begging for recognition in a twilight zone of coalescence. With the insistent horizon, almost slipping out of sight, there was a glimpse of a deeper, darker artistic vision. Why, in such a sun drenched country, Kouwenhoven should persist in evoking a shadow land is a question which always adds something to the perverse pleasure of engaging with these brooding images.' [23] We will never know the answer to this question and the artist's practice, so embedded in genuine affection for the forms and materials which define ancient arid landscapes will not raise it. For the present it is enough to accept that Pamela Kouwenhoven's notional worlds are lit by a black sun in which the shadows are the brightest points of illumination.
John Neylon
January 2009Artist quotes, unless otherwise indicated, are from taped discussions between the artist and John Neylon 2007 - 2008
John Neylon is an Adelaide-based independent art writer and curator
FOOTNOTES
[1] Art of the State /State of the Art 2, curator Harry Sherwin, Country Arts of South Australia
[2] Adam Dutkiewicz, 'A look behind masks', The Advertiser, 27 August 1993
[3] Stephanie Radok, Beyond Boundaries', The Adelaide Review, September, 1993
[4] Myrana Wahlquist, catalogue essay, Beyond Boundaries, Art Zone Gallery, Adelaide, 17 - 29 August 1993
[5] Emma Zakarevicius, 'Death Becomes Her', dB magazine Issue 282, July 2002
[6] 'Pam draws on Aussie symbol for third win', The Courier, Wednesday October 1, 2003
[7] Margot Osborne, 'Intimate Topographies', 2004, catalogue essay for exhibition Intimate Topographies, Hahndorf Academy, Adelaide Hills, 31 July - 29 August, 2004
[8] Ken Orchard, 'the insistent horizon', essay for exhibition catalogue, the insistent horizon, Driden Fine Arts, Hardy's Tintara McLaren Vale, February 20 - March 25, 2004
[9] Pamela Kouwenhoven, statement, artist's website www.adam.com.au/pkouw
[10] Karen Zadra, 'Dryland: Pamela Kouwenhoven', catalogue essay for exhibition of the same name, University of the Sunshine Coast Gallery 17 July - 17 August 2008
[11] Paula York, catalogue notes, 'Pamela Kouwenhoven: Recent work', Prospect Gallery, 4 - 25 June 2006
[12] Ian Hamilton 'CHARGE IT', catalogue essay, 'Pamela Kouwenhoven: Recent work', Prospect Gallery, 4 - 25 June 2006
[13] John Neylon, 'Pamela Kouwenhoven', The Adelaide Review, June/July, 2006
[14] 'Neylon, ibid
[15] See Bernard Smith, Terry Smith, Christopher Heathcote, Australian Painting 1788 - 2000, p.368, Oxford University Press, 2001
[16] The inaugural Palmer Sculpture Biennial was held in 2004. The site is a former sheep grazing property at Palmer, about 70 km east of Adelaide, purchased in 2001 by the Adelaide-based sculptor Greg Johns with a view to restoring and conserving the natural assets of the area and to act as a site for sculpture and land-linked sculpture-based programs. See: http://www.gregjohnssculpture.com
Murray Darling Palimpsest is an Australian contemporary visual arts event directly engaged with issues of environmental and social sustainability in the Murray Darling Basin. The project involves artists in host organisations throughout the Basin.
[17] Ian Hamilton, 'Intersect', catalogue essay, Gallery 25, Mildura, 12 September - 5 November 2003
[18] Zadra, ibid
[19] Stephanie Radok, 'Mysterious Terrain', Australian Art Review, March - June 2006
[20] Zadra ibid
[21] Osborne, ibid
[22] Kouwenhoven's work titled Paleao Extinctus was exhibited in the 2008 Heysen Sculpture Biennial 'Homage to Nature', sited at Heysen's Shady Pool, The Cedars Hahndorf
[23] John Neylon, 'Slow burn of artistic vision', The Adelaide Review, April 2004