Essays on Earth Brodie Ellis, Paul Kane & John Wolseley

 

In the Bendigo Art Gallery, beginning in September 2023, a multimedia exhibition will be shown that links the art of poetry to that of painting in a uniquely immersive and powerful way. The exhibition is based on a series of ‘verse essays’, Earth, Air, Water, Fire (2022), by the American poet Paul Kane. The show is a collaboration between three friends – Brodie Ellis multidisciplinary artist of Castlemaine; John Wolseley, artist and printmaker from the Whipstick forest near Bendigo; and Paul Kane, poet of Mount Glasgow in the goldfields of Central Victoria, and of upstate New York.

As you enter the first gallery you find yourself surrounded by large collaged watercolour and woodcut works, sculptures and epic photographs. Wolseley’s paintings, filled with pond life, birds, carbon traces and geological rubbings, contrast with the hand-coloured experimental microscopy of Ellis in the next gallery, luminous with their strange dark beauty of natural forms, seed pods, rock and plant cross-sections..

The works are hung around the walls in ways which correspond to the five elemental themes of the poems. As you follow the work in the first two rooms you are lured into a third space by the verbal music of Paul Kane’s voice reading the poems in time to the paintings which are in motion, projected round the walls: the two art forms interweaving and in-flowing together as one—analogous to, in Ellis’s words, ‘a mountainous Japanese scroll slowly unraveling.’

This exhibition is a triumphant re-visioning of the great Ekphrastic tradition that begins in ancient Greece – whereby a poem or prose piece interprets or vividly brings to life  a work of art. Perhaps John Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ best exemplifies this tradition in English, as he speculates on the lovers who dance and play pipes as they move round the storied urn - simultaneously frozen in time but also in perpetual motion. In this exhibition the images of plants and birds and microscopic forms slowly revolve around the gallery walls while the words of the poems dance in and out of them. The difference here is that instead of poems interpreting or engaging with the art, the works of art actively illuminate and heighten the poetry, creating a symbiotic relationship between them. In effect, this is a reverse ekphrasis, a new genre tradition.

This immersive experience stands as an invitation to deep listening and, by extension, deep seeing. Like all such endeavors, it is intended to elicit a process of kinesis, the process whereby a viewer/listener responds to a stimulus with emotional and intellectual activity that is as much subconscious as conscious, seeking–in this case– to complete the arc of the work in more than three dimensions, as if time itself were suspended in an imagistic flow that enwraps the viewer moment by expanding moment.

In providing the framework for this presentation, Brodie Ellis—a multidisciplinary artist whose video installations include Contact and Witness (2019) and The Crystal World (2016), and who has long been involved with social and environmental issues in her artwork—connects parallel concerns between herself and Wolseley and Kane in a three-way combination of text, image and sound. This is very much in keeping with her overall work as an artist, where she engages directly with social and environmental issues. In doing so, she employs the devices of sculpture, film and photography to connect deeply and directly with local places, ecologies and histories.

John Wolseley has, over the last thirty years, has been searching ‘to discover how we dwell and move within landscape.’ As he puts it, he operates as ‘a hybrid mix of artist and scientist; one who tries to relate the minutiae of the natural world - leaf, feather and beetle wing - to the abstract dimensions of the earth's dynamic systems.’ Known for his large works on paper, Wolseley uses ‘techniques of watercolour, collage, frottage, nature printing and other methods of direct physical or kinetic contact’ as a way of ‘collaborating with the actual plants, birds, trees, rocks and earth of a particular place.’ In Essays on Earth, his large works grow even larger on the walls, and details arise that are like fractals in which the minute mimics the maximal, the world suddenly connected in a comprehensive pattern that is scalable large and small. That pattern also mimics the flow of Kane’s verse as it cascades auditorily. The interleaving of images among the verses creates a comprehensive vision and re-visioning of our place in the natural world.

According to Antonella Reim and Tony Hughes-D’Aeth, writing in Ecosustainable Narratives (2022), Paul Kane’s ‘verse essays’ are ‘in the tradition of Lucretius, Pope, Auden and Ashbery’ for the way the poetry embraces ‘shifting points of view, including environmental, ecological, mythological, historical, and phenomenological perspectives.’ The verse, while ‘philosophically serious’, is also ‘at times, witty and ludic in tone.’ Kane, who divides his time between New York and central Victoria, has collaborated on a number of projects with artists, photographers, musicians and other poets. Earth, Air, Water, Fire is an extension and culmination of the interests and concerns articulated in his previous poetry and essays. His collaboration with Wolseley, in particular, is the culmination of an extensive mutual engagement with each other’s work over many years.

While there are three separate individuals involved in this project, the names should, by all rights, denote a single creative identity: Ellis-Wolseley-Kane. Together they have created this ekphrastic extravaganza, Essays on Earth.