Irene Briant

Lost
9 October to 15 November 2009
Carnegie Gallery, Hobart

A woman wanders away from her bush home in the dead of Winter in 1908. She remains lost for nine days then, close to death, she staggers out onto farmland two miles above St Columba Falls. As the Newspaper reported on July 14, 1908 ‘The whole business is wrapped in the mystery which attaches to so many incidents in the lives of those who live close to nature’.

How do we confront the unknown? It is one thing to make a pact, to establish an arrangement with those things outside our control. In doing so we define a zone which is ours and a zone which is the Other. Our space has to be created, marked out, cleared defined, inhabited and protected. But can it really be protected? Is the loss of security and sanity ever more than a moment away?

We can strive to remain within those safely defined spaces, looking across from one to the other yet striving to keep the Other at a safe distance. But there will always be a point beyond which we cannot safely enter, where we lose control, where fate is no longer ours to determine.

The Australian Bush is such a place. The earliest settlers enjoyed a highly ambivalent relationship to it, rarely perhaps as negative as the early arrivals like Marcus Clarke who stated that: ‘The Australian forests are funereal, secret, stern. Their solitude is desolation. They seem to stifle in their black gorges, a story of sullen despair...’ but the early settlers relationship with it can nonetheless never have been an entirely a trusting one.

In the art, literature and popular imagination of this country the ‘Lost One’ has remained a constant theme, from the paintings of Frederick McCubbin, the famous Little Boy Lost who inspired the Johnny Horton hit of the ‘60’s, through to the movie Picnic at Hanging Rock and it is natural that this should be so, even today.

Annie Beechey’s extraordinary experience in the bush has been entered and retraced by Irene Briant. Through a series of beautiful floor and wall installations Briant explores the psyche of the Lost One, projecting into that imagined state. Within this group of work we gradually break from the known and step into a world of half light, shadows, mirrors and shards of familiarity. The dream of home dims and is inextricably tied to this new, mysterious reality. Through beautiful ambiguous objects, clothed in exotic fabric and rich colour we enter a strange hallucinatory world, a world of ennui, of fear, of confusion connected by the threads of hope.

The totality of the physicality of such an experience from the specific tactility of surfaces touched and traversed, forms interrogated and negotiated, is deeply and palpably evoked in the powerful presence of pieces such as Cairn – a pile of rocks covered in a material equally evoking moss or velvet, (expressive of the Lost One’s simultaneous duality). The viewer begins to be unsure about how to trust the senses, and later the experience which they suggest, just as the Lost One would. Just as things become apparently more clear and palpable so the known meaning recedes. There is great elegance in the simple dualities that Briant evokes.

More importantly the psychological dislocation and re-framing is addressed in exquisite clarity in works such as the three Still Lifes (Camouflage, Black and Moss Green) which so neatly evoke the contents of a comfortable Victorian parlour yet remain exquisitely surreal in their hallucinatory reality. These are tricks, mirages – they are the mind at work, trying to find a way back.

As in all Briant’s work, the exploration of textiles, wire, woven materials, pattern and the decorative are all interwoven closely in this exhibition. What is always striking about Briant’s work is the extraordinary sensitivity she has for the correlation between a material and an idea, and later to fully integrate that through into pure form. In Lost the correspondence between all areas of her interest and formal language are united in a seamless, powerful and moving way.

Kitchen Floor Landscape, All Night Blue, Wet on Wet and Oval with Skirt are all based on women’s dress forms, some mutate old linoleum floor surfacing into dresses simply and elegantly suggesting that we are ‘mapped’ and ‘placed’ in certain domestic frames and that is where our primary meaning resides until that is disrupted. At a certain point the dress breaks free of the decorative constraint of the material assuming a form akin to a series of choking vines, or snakes, cloaked in midnight blue. The night too brings it’s own hallucinations. At another point the dress is no more than a tattered relic, a parody, merely the slightest echo of its former self, as was the dress she was found in.

Large Mirror, a disturbingly human-scaled form, reminiscent of a outsized hand mirror both hides and reveals, flashes of the viewer intermingle with ferns inter cutting the image from the edges. The sensation is that of passing through a sunny glade with its stroboscopic dark/light effects. How can one focus here? This mirror hiding as it reveals, is more at home in Alice’s Wonderland, or in any place where logic is turned on its head and the eyes can no longer be trusted.

This extraordinary narrative provides the perfect subject for an artist of Briant’s skills and interests as it allows her to delve into her unique material language to explore the spaces of the psyche which will always sit outside the safe and the known. The point where the last fence symbolically holds the Other at bay – this is where Briant enters and begins this extraordinary journey.

Sean Kelly

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