The Tree in Changing Light
Collaborative prints by Marianne Courtenay and Kathryn Orton
Reviewed by Lucia Parrella, ‘Imprint’ the quarterly journal of the Print Council of Australia, March 2014.
“A tree has buried parts – the roots – and aerial twigs touching the sky. They catch the imagination at both ends. In the shadows, a tree can stay hidden but when light changes…a formerly unnoticed tree stands out. The way it responds to wind, light, landscape and soils tells an ever-changing story.”[1]
Marianne Courtenay and Kathryn Orton presented an ever-changing landscape in The Tree in Changing Light, their exhibition of collaborative multi-colour prints and individual drawings which opened at Project Contemporary Artspace in Wollongong on 30 August 2013. Reflecting the artists’ shared emotional connection with trees, the exhibition was the culmination of a two year collaboration drawing inspiration from the environs of the Upper Shoalhaven River on the Tablelands of NSW. Trees have figured prominently in the work of both artists over a sustained period; each has returned to the subject time and again for creative stimulation. For this joint project, the dialogue between the individual artists and the Australian bush encompassed a new source of inspiration: the conversation between the artists themselves as creative collaborators.
The Tree in Changing Light does not follow the more conventional route of printmaking collaborations with clearly defined roles between artist and master printer. Courtenay and Orton are both accomplished artist-printmakers with long histories of commitment to their individual printmaking practice. For this collaborative project they each began by working autonomously in their Wollongong and Braidwood studios, creating matrices and printing lino, wood and collagraphs based on their reference drawings. Exchanging their prints, each artist then allowed the other to develop the image by printing additional layers. For the artists, the act of relinquishing sole authorship stirred mixed feelings. On one hand, they described moments of trepidation before printing over impressions created by the other. At the same time, they acknowledged that the exchange opened up dynamic possibilities for overlap and intersection, discussion and digression.
Courtenay and Orton are skilled observers and recorders of nature and their sensitively rendered drawings and prints ensured that the viewer, like the artists themselves, was firmly grounded in the unique physicality of the Australian bush. The exhibition included two individually realised drawings, spanning floor to ceiling: a Bluegum by Courtenay and a Eucalyptus Rossii by Orton. Notwithstanding their scale and powerful towering presence, these solitary, monochromatic trunks conveyed a palpable aura of vulnerability and loss.
The collaborative print-based works, which formed the centrepiece of the exhibition, elicited a very different response. With their striking graphic quality, these 56 multi-coloured works, arranged in eight gridded clusters, transmitted a sense of vitality and regeneration. In each print, energetic cut marks and multiple layers of opaque and transparent ink served to both shroud and to reveal an intricate web of branches, trunks, roots and other arboreal forms. Hidden symmetries and interconnections were suggested through repetition and overprinting. In one image, a maze of rambling angophora branches mirrored the tree’s expansive root system: the duplication achieved by inverting and reprinting the same matrix. In this playful experimentation the artists highlighted the mystery of the forest floor underfoot, while also beckoning a look upward toward the canopy and its relationship with the sky.
Experimentation was also evident in the artists’ choice of inventive colour schemes: their palette ranging from subtle and monochromatic tones to sumptuous and discordant colour combinations. While references to the Australian bush were strongly present, these striking colour combinations evoked the symbolic realm of trees, conjuring up the enchanted forests of folk tales, the dark wood of the lost pilgrim and all the other forested landscapes of our larger cultural imagination. The idea of the forest as a magic place where transformation occurs was reinforced by the appearance of an ephemeral paper forest, gradually assembled on the back wall of the gallery by the artists with input from gallery visitors.
The Tree in Changing Light takes its title from Roger McDonald’s collection of essays meditating on our relationship with trees and the land. For, McDonald, “Almost every aspect of trees suggests a shape for our psychological and spiritual existence”. Like the author, Courtenay and Orton are attuned to the multi-faceted dimensions of trees: “their presence in the landscape, their forms, textures, changing moods and their sense of spirit.” Through their innovative collaboration, Marianne Courtenay and Kathryn Orton have found a unique vision that transcends the immediate and the individual, presenting the tree as a potent symbol of our relationship to nature.
References:
1 & 2 Roger McDonald, quoted in ‘The Tree of Man’ interview with Murray Walden 2001
3 Courtenay & Orton Artists’ Statement 2014