VALERIE SPARKS: Dark Garden

Dark Garden is an exceptional progression of Valerie Sparks’s celebrated ‘Sanctuary’ series. This latest exquisitely detailed collection takes on an almost calligraphic form, with the vertical orientation of the images directing the eye to fall rhythmically down the picture surface. Radiant splinters of cool light coat the undersides of leaves and petals, catching momentarily along each stem. Every shadow is deliberate and necessary, every stroke speaks of a single observation. While the weather is ever present in Sparks’ imagery, Dark Garden is a different exploration of the figure-ground relationship for the artist; there is a dissolving of the picture plane, and a strange new darkness pulls us toward its interior. The soundless and soft clouds of previous works rumble forth for Dark Garden, taking on a mountainous and inky form and pushing blushing pink proteas in striking contrast.

It is impossible not to recognise Sparks’ ground-breaking works. Her nationally exhibited and internationally collected photographic installations have transformed galleries and museums across Australia for close to two decades. Uniquely, Sparks works do not have the consumptive quality of most immersive installations; they are not about a loss of space or time, or a disappearing of the self. They are complex transgressions in the geological sense, a laying of the sea over the land, the continent over the ocean. It is not that we are disappeared in an exotic elsewhere, it is that we are invited to see ourselves inlayed within the architecture of the image, within the architecture of the museum, and Dark Garden takes this rare moment for reflection to new heights.

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