Contending with Complexity
Prismatic Tectonics, Visions (formerly Bowerbank Ninow), Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, 2021
Francis McWhannell
I looked at the natural world, and it seemed to share my feelings, to be trying in vain to escape its approaching doom. The waves of the sea sped in disorderly flight towards the horizon; the sea birds, the dolphins and flying fish, hurtled frenziedly through the air; the islands trembled and grew transparent, endeavouring to detach themselves, to rise as vapour and vanish in space.[1]
—Anna Kavan, Ice (1967)
They get inside you, Georgie Hill’s watercolours. They are uncommonly rich in their materiality, emphasising the sturdiness of paper and the vast range of effects possible working with a single medium and a small number of hues. Spend any amount of time considering them and they begin to infiltrate your experiences, colour your vision of the world about you. Complexly allusive, they flicker through diverse entities and phenomena. A flood of rainwater surging into a drain. The glassy tunnel of a rolling wave. The ragged luminosity of a damp sky. A stop light staining a steam-covered window. The streaky frills of a conch shell. The evocations differ from moment to moment and, no doubt, from person to person. They dart between categories, now biological, now elemental, now physical, now psychic, now earthly, now transcendent. The sense of energy is undeniable, but it is essentially elusive—as potent as sunlight and equally ungraspable.
The influences on Hill’s work are diverse. Literature has occupied a key position in her research of late. She is an avid reader of Anna Kavan and Doris Lessing, being impressed by the acuteness, experimental nature, and psychological depth of their writings. She is also attracted to their use of science fiction to posit alternate realities by turns plausible and fantastic, dystopian and more hopeful. Kavan’s 1967 novel Ice, which explores a world mired in conflict and on the brink of ecological collapse, has been a particular source of fascination. Storm-like gestures and spectrum-like gradations in Hill’s works resonate strongly with Kavan’s speculations and recall such real-world climatic catastrophes as the recent inundations in Germany and the heatwaves and wildfires presently ravaging Canada and the United States.
Hill’s enthusiasm for Kavan and Lessing is closely associated with her longstanding interest in women who helped to advance the aesthetics and (often utopian) ideals of modernism, expanding conceptions of what art can be and do. She has looked at the lives and practices of artists and designers like Eileen Gray, Frances Hodgkins, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, being struck not only by the quality and transformative impact of their work, but also by their relative lack of visibility in historical accounts. Together with Kavan and Lessing, such individuals have become for Hill ‘a lineage of voices’, affecting her practice deeply, if not always overtly, and encouraging her to seek out further women whose contributions to the development of modernist art, and particularly abstraction, have been downplayed or overlooked.
For several years now, Hill has been examining ‘mediumistic’ artists, including Hilma af Klint, Madge Gill, Georgiana Houghton, and Emma Kunz. Af Klint has lately achieved widespread recognition for abstract works that predate those produced by the likes of Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. She was a member of ‘The Five’, a group of spiritualist women from Sweden who were inspired by theosophical thinking (as, indeed, were Kandinsky and Mondrian) and engaged in séances.[2] Her visionary paintings incorporate elements that recall the natural world—no doubt reflecting an earlier interest in botanical art—and mathematical or scientific figures. Hill’s works, too, feature organic and diagrammatic components. Gestural passages encompass forms suggestive of petals, leaves, or fins. Curving lines, produced by slicing into the surface of the paper and exposing its white heart, can evoke contour lines on a map or isobars on a weather chart.
Unlike af Klint, Hill is not driven by spirituality. Nevertheless, she remains interested in thought systems and world views beyond the Western empiricist tradition, and in cross-culturally common values. As a maker, she increasingly favours intuition over calculation, embracing automatic processes consonant with surrealist practices. The gestural portions of her works are wholly improvised. The white lines are subject to some testing; Hill uses string to try out forms before fixing them. Incised and painted triangular grids found in earlier works are no longer in evidence. Collage elements in Prismatic Tectonics (3) and Prismatic Tectonics (4) echo the grids and their systematic colouration (the bands correspond to gestures in the base image), but the structures are sparser and more open. Although the lines are relatively thick, they are obviously superimposed rather than excavated. As such, they feel less permanent, more subject to change.
In other works, Hill has laid pieces cut from other gestural paintings over the base images. Prismatic Tectonics (1), Prismatic Tectonics (2), and Prismatic Tectonics (6) feature broadly quadrilateral fragments, which sit atop the supports in the manner of islands. In Prismatic Tectonics (5), perhaps the most radical work in the show, the pieces have been formed in such a way that they interlock, like puzzle pieces or tectonic plates. They neither subduct nor collide but float discretely over the just-visible mantle of the underlying painting. Hill’s works have often included beguiling illusionistic elements: cuts that mock string, designs that appear printed, fictive perforations. Here, a different sort of trick is at play. The crust does not form a coherent image, and it is not clear how many different paintings compose it. One strains to find a before in the after. The puzzle is irresistible and quite impossible to solve.
There is a note of sombreness to Prismatic Tectonics as a whole. The titular allusion to geological forces tends to recall the truly natural disasters that sit alongside those created or exacerbated by humankind. As someone who experienced the Christchurch earthquakes first-hand, Hill is aware that existence is sufficiently precarious without our contributions. Manifold as it is, Prismatic Tectonics calls to mind the multiplicity of struggles we face as a fractured collective, and the difficulty associated with getting to the bottom of things. At the same time, it is hardly pessimistic. The works are far too animated for that, far too full of wonder. You write a postapocalyptic narrative to call for a course correction. You make paintings that speak to the cosmos, and to the diverse intelligences within it, because a call must be made many times and in many ways if it is to be answered.
[1] Anna Kavan, Ice (London: Peter Owen, 2013), 134–35.
[2] Anya Ventura, ‘Secret Séances and High Masters: The Making of Mystic Painter Hilma af Klint’, Frieze, 11 October 2018, https://www.frieze.com/article/secret-seances-and-high-masters-making-mystic-painter-hilma-af-klint.
A Greengage Sea
Concave Iridescence, Visions (formerly Bowerbank Ninow), Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, 2020
Abby Cunnane
“...completely encircled by the tremendous ice walls, which were made fluid by explosions of blinding light, so that they moved and changed with a continuous liquid motion, advancing in torrents of ice, avalanches as big as oceans, flooding everywhere...an overhanging ring of frigid, fiery, colossal waves about to collapse.”
—Anna Kavan, Ice (1967)
Last night at dinner, we were talking about huskies and dogsleds in Alaska. Deborah’s dad has been on one, and he said how quiet it was, except for the dogs’ breathing, and the skiffing sound of the sled’s steel runners along the snow. The conversation moved to ice melting, to Iceland, to someone’s agate wrist bracelet smashing into smithereens on the pavement when she fell. It moved off again, to recent floods and Auckland’s drought, to the drainage of Waikato swamps for farming and the raging peat fires that sometimes ensued. Deborah’s dad said peat tastes like smoke, or maybe it’s the other way round. I still had the skiffing sound in my ears, the incandescent burn of ice cold in my eyes.
The ‘greengage sea’ comes from Ice by Anna Kavan, a book and a writer Georgie introduced me to. It’s the kind of image that almost gets lost in the turbulence of Kavan’s writing. In Ice the narrative hinges on an ice age, possibly due to nuclear detonation, and an unspecified geopolitical crisis. The often-terrifying descriptions of the climate glitter, and sometimes shatter, under their own intensity. Sometimes, they seem to relate in an oblique way to Georgie’s work, to feed from a similar light source. I read, “...sheathed in ice, [the trees] dripped and sparkled with weird prismatic jewels, reflecting the vivid changing cascades above.” You do you see it, don’t you—ice fracturing the light, the light exploding like an iris, or turning in on itself like a shell? It may be that it’s Georgie’s most recent paintings that are reflected in the iced trees, images within Kavan’s image.
Of Ice, a critic notes: “...the reader cannot distinguish between material reality and the hectic projection of the hero, who admits: “I had a curious feeling I was living on several planes simultaneously; the overlapping of these planes was confusing.” I don’t really agree; the ‘hectic projection’ of the unnamed, misogynistic hero is I think clearly distinct from the material reality of the story. As a reader, disassociated from the protagonist and his predatory, narrative-driving instinct, it is the catastrophic magnificence of the environment that I experience most vividly. In this sense the book feels almost empty of human presence, certainly, of empathy. Instead of actors, there is an architecture of planes, surfaces reflecting the impossible clashing of elements: fire and ice, the ‘frigid, fiery, colossal waves,’ sheer and frozen.
The greengage sea, that’s different: simple as a plum and heavy like lead. A plum bob, a weight that keeps the vertical line clean and straight. A plum and the bloom of a bruise. A sea that is a plum, is as heavy as swimming in denim. A sea that is a skin, the skin of a plum the colour of old bottle-glass, sugary—greengages have an exceptionally high sugar level, some contain almost 30% fermentable sugar—and deliquescing. I can taste it: it’s good after all that odorless ice, when I read the words ‘greengage sea.’ The acidic green background in some of Georgie’s earlier works comes to mind, the soaked rawness of this colour, its depth and stillness in relation to the more turbulent forms now emerging. Certainly, the sea keeps appearing in Georgie’s work. In the past we’ve had conversations about the tides and storms that register in her recent paintings; the stonewash aesthetic of the backgrounds; the inherent associations of wetness and solubility that come with using watercolour. We’ve talked about the works being like forecasts for bad weather and rising atmospheric pressures. Not separate from this discussion, sea level rise is on all of our minds, all of the time. I think this is maybe why I am reading so hungrily about ice, painfully, and why some days even typing on this screen has come to seem like a tide swallowing the page. This conversation continues. No one argues the weather is not political, not now; every representation is breached by the reality of climate change.
Often, I am caught by the tension in this work between the restless, heavily worked backgrounds, and the hard-edged triangular structures that bisect them. White lines, incised into the paper, fly like kite tails in a rising storm. Standing in front of the works yesterday, returning now to the images on my phone, I see in this tension a system in transition, under stress. Georgie has said it before me, “For me the surface layer speaks of anxiety and chaos, but also gives a sense of space and movement. The straight incised lines contain and hold, in a protective, potentially predictable way—like interior space, like knowable systems and patterns—but simultaneously restrict and direct your eye. It is a transitional space, one of movement...The systems have to respond and change.”
These works are documents of change. The scale, context, and the way in which you make sense of this change is personal: your metaphor may be molecular, atmospheric, astronomical, psychic—or it may be something physical, felt in the gut. The greengage sea image is only one way to get here, to this present recognition of certain change. Kavan again: “It was possible that polar modifications had resulted, and would lead to a substantial climatic change due to the refraction of solar heat...a vast ice-mass would be created, reflecting the sun’s rays and throwing them back into outer space.” It is all madness, all possible.
Deborah’s dad is ninety. Later, after we’d eaten, he said the sledding was part of a cruise he had been on a long time ago. They had to fly in an aeroplane first, across the snow to get to where the dogs were, and it was expensive. I found I was relieved: it should be hard to get there, you should have to cross over oceans, break with ordinary time, before you are just once in your life flying along at the ecstatic pace of running dogs, while the ice continent melts beneath you—and the sky? The sky behaves unimaginably.
[1]Emma Garman, ‘Feminise your canon: Anna Kavan’, The Paris Review, 10 December 2018 https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/12/10/feminize-your-canon-anna-kavan/
[2] The title of previous works Forecast (Detail) (2019) refers to a film in Doris Lessing’s 1971 novel Briefing for a Descent into Hell, which takes place inside the mind of an amnesiac, exploring fantasy worlds in connection to social and ecological issues.
The Weather In My Head
Written for Verb Wellington in response to Concave Iridescence, Visions (formerly Bowerbank Ninow), Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, 2020
Chris Holdaway
Georgie Hill’s watercolour inventions are everything good theory has told us abstraction shouldn’t be: decidedly layered instead of striving for bold flatness; avidly literary instead of appealing to objectivity. This all the while achieving feats of cohesion which should make even the most arch modernist proud: the washed surfaces with stark and colourful incisions give the firm impression of mixed media and constructive applications when there really is nothing but paint and paper. It’s these kinds of grey allegiances and material complexities that can really get you excited about painted patterns on a surface in the 21st Century.
Like most abstraction, these works are in part about working out how their permutations of features may align or contrast, assert themselves or experience some measure of chaos. The decision arenas in Hill’s intricate landscapes are three-fold. First the hazy field governed by either blue or green, with transitional tones of yellow, red, and peach; sometimes with an overall air of darkness but more often vibrantly popping. Then the triangles cut into thick watercolour paper that blots and swells with pulses of primary colour — as if to place Mondrian’s blocks inside the lines this time — configured with either left-right symmetry or a chiral feel of opposable thumbs that may be uneven but are a long way from unbalanced. Another breed of incision leaves the paper’s pale grain exposed; a vacuum for thoughts such as: how many of me should there be?, should I cross over myself or spiral in space?, to admit only smooth curves or take some sharp corners? The order of presentation here is artificial: with each visit to one of Georgie’s exhibitions I’ve overheard spirited debate as to which aspect spectators believe came first.
Hill’s 2020 show Concave Iridescence (1–26 September at Visions gallery in Auckland, New Zealand) follows Residence Within A Prism from 2019; the works at once recognisable even as they offer new developments. The triangular vocabulary remains familiar, while the painted ground is freer, endorsing a wider range of tones and gestures, and the white incisions are far more profuse and frantic than what we have seen before. The sense of anxiety that one can feel going into each painting is certainly magnified — and who could blame her — but it’s not as simple as the output turning into a commensurable mess. Perhaps counter-intuitively, as each element ratchets up its own nervous complexity, overall integration actually seems to increase; the heightened competition pulling everything together. In a sense these newer pieces are harder to look at, offering fewer easy points of separation to focus the eyes upon, but they are richer for it. If these are pictures of escalating disquiet, even dread, they are also of actively working through each incursion, and not resignation.
At a time of perpetual crisis, when an honest relation to the material world is more important than anything else, Hill’s personal materialism asks us to consider deeply the structures we seek to impose, the control mechanisms we deploy, and the reactions we must encounter. The storms are rising in their intensity, encroaching into the semblance of ordered and linear vector space. We can reach for any number of tenuously depictive metaphors here. Say meteorological diagrams and our forecast abilities in the face of increasingly extreme weather events — a reading the artist has spoken publicly about and alluded to with titles such as ‘Forecast Detail’. Or pulses of data packets in GPS triangulated global logistics networks that have turned much of the world — certainly what McKenzie Wark calls ‘the over-developed world’ — into a ravenously consuming machine. Yet for all the expressions of excess, we should also reckon with the unavoidable entropy on display, for no amount of paint stripper or re-priming can ever un-incise the paper. These works demonstrate the tremendous risk of being in the world in a way that few paintings are able, and can suggest an ethical question: what if every act were taken with the care necessary for being truly honest about its irreversibility? This is their chief melancholic aspect to me; not the watercolour mood, but the insistence that, in spite of what we see in overwhelming volume, such thinking is not only possible, but already exists..
Both Concave Iridescence and Residence Within A Prism take significant cues from literature: the earlier exhibition finding the titles of its works in Doris Lessing’s novel Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), the latter responding to thoughts and images from Anna Kavan’s novel Ice (1967). For Hill, science fiction in particular offers a model for being that is self-consciously and inescapably involved in making the world as it goes, of deciding how it will be at the same time as acting in it.
We may correlate the anxiety latent in Hill’s paintings with Lessing’s depiction of many different fantasy environments from the interior space of madness, and Kavan’s tale of climate catastrophe in the wake of nuclear war with Hill’s explicit ecological concerns. This is not to suggest of course that these authors are telling us how the world should be, but they do have to decide how it is in their narratives, no matter what else is said. This kind of thinking opens up the opportunity for technics over generic utopianism in a way that dovetails with the artist’s attention to material process and detail, for the decision to mine rare earth metals for manufacturing solar panels is not different in kind from that of firing a power station with coal.
Georgie has also revealed the importance of her studies concerning early abstractionists who were women, particularly Hilma af Klint (1862–1944), whose startling early experiments compel us to rewrite the art history that launches the pictorial revolution from Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian (see the major 2018–19 Guggenheim exhibition Paintings for the Future ). If something so seemingly solid as hard abstraction can have its foundations reorganised, what else is up for grabs in the gross material world? The state of play calls for all kinds of exploratory thinking, and Hill’s interest in artists like af Klint, Madge Gill, and Georgina Houghton extends to their occult activities as spirit mediums. In the triangular forms of her own paintings it is easy to see icons such as the Platonic solids, the ichthys , or even the Kabbalistic Tree of Life . And in 2019 the watercolour ground was overall a fairly uniform texture, while for the two largest works in the 2020 show in particular the ‘storm’ seems to be opening up to the possibility of revelation. My qualification here is not so much to conjecture whether these works are exhortations to the supernatural; Hill’s knowledge of and research into these women’s lives and work is in any case a matter of concrete historical reality. Rather, whatever our systems of knowledge (e.g. meteorology), we need always to consider what might exceed them. This is in a sense the movement between Residence Within A Prism and Concave Iridescence.
Like most art concerned with formal experimentation, Hill’s paintings are highly iterative, and abundant with trial and error. In addition to the main exhibition room for Concave Iridescence, there is a collection of small collages or ‘notes’ that together serve as a lens into what made the current body of work possible. Here the layering and apliqué is more literal, with attached segments exceeding boundaries, and subtractive cuts that can go all the way through to the gallery walls.
What is perhaps most extraordinary about Georgie’s procedures is that these separate techniques are absorbed into the final paintings not as additional material, but produced only from what is already there, like a kind of conjuring trick. It bears repeating: there really is nothing other than paint on a single sheet of paper. Here we may draw a contrast with the art of Cat Fooks , the other comparably tactile ‘painter’ currently working in New Zealand, whose creations are truly cumulative. The stark diagonals of alternating colour in Hill’s triangular frames might also recall Ian Scott’s Lattices, which ( as I have written about elsewhere ) pose their own challenges when thinking about the illusion of layered space.
Hope as a project is extremely hard work, and in many ways requires the same kind of indefatigable determination as the most intricate labour. Hill’s paintings are far from pictures of joy, but they are certainly of possibility; the productive compulsion of strife between flux and stricture; the dual necessity and impossibility of systematising. But neither are they capitulations to a hopelessly varied and incomprehensible world. This new show makes the previous event (which I loved) look almost tentative in comparison, her ventures becoming even more daring and energetic. These works are powerful and gripping both up close and at a distance, and moreover they are simply interesting. As interesting as anything in our arts today.
Residence Within a Prism
Residence Within a Prism, Bowerbank Ninow, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, 2019
Andrew Clarke
Georgie Hill works thoughtfully and methodically, building her works piece by piece, as if assembling the complex inner workings of a finely-tuned instrument, either musical or scientific—or both. Hill’s works resemble diagrams, although their function is as much lyrical as it is schematic. Her work is perhaps best interpreted in terms of verbs, rather than adjectives, as a sequence of actions taken by the artist: directing, measuring, repeating, sensing, connecting, superimposing. Likewise, the way Hill’s works are made involves multiple layers of painting that react and respond to one another.
Her first layers are nebulous, chaotic fields of colour, resembling rain, clouds or other natural phenomena in their irregular, organic patterning. Next, Hill cuts into her heavy paper support with a blade, creating raised channels within which the paint flows, allowing her to render a second layer of sharply defined, precise line work while also bringing into play the raised edges of the incision. These lines are painted so that whenever they cross a tonal boundary in the background, their colour changes, injecting a self-reflexive, pseudo-random element to the work. Bahktin regards creativity as a fundamentally dialogic process, in which the artist speaks “in the language of another’s discourse,” and by doing so realises the potential of that other, makes them whole and brings forth the aesthetic object (1) This is the multivalent, circuitous view of the artist’s role depicted in Hill’s works; the shifting, prophetic territories they offer the viewer are also the terrain of the creative process itself, absorbing and being absorbed by the inexorable tides of future events.
Hill cites as particular influences on her practice the works of Hilma af Klint and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, both early modernists who dealt with pure abstraction while that form of art was still in itsinfancy. Hill’s work evokes ideas such as communication systems, zones of force or influence, or schematic descriptions of complex systems, all of which could equally be applied to af Klint and Taeuber-Arp’s works. Hill shares with af Klint a concern with the dynamics that underpin human experience, perception and thought, a desire to unpick the threads of the pattern that make up the phenomenal world. Viewed through this prism, Hill’s works could likewise be interpreted as diagrams, schematics or plans. She casts the works in this light when she refers to their status as “approximations of future events” and “systems, trends or prophecies.” The idea of “prophecy” is a potent one, in this context, containing both the idea of temporal displacement—a statement out of time, communicating with the future in the same way that af Klint’s occultist abstractions, unseen during her lifetime, gained new currency almost a century later—and the idea of a received message alien to the listener but susceptible to interpretation and exegesis.
The titles of all but one work in this exhibition are drawn from Doris Lessing’s 1971 visionary novel Briefing for a Descent into Hell. This text is difficult to summarise, but hinges on the inner world of an amnesiac professor and uses science fiction and fantasy elements as a framework to explore metaphysical and spiritual concerns, as well humanity’s impact on the environment. Hill’s work is similarly concerned with the way large scale events are reflected in the microcosmic realms of thought, memory and dream. Having experienced the Christchurch earthquakes in 2010 and 2011, she has a first-hand understanding of the natural world’s potential for instability, and the way such events become internalised parts of private psychic landscapes. This connection between the broad and the intimate, between exteriority and interiority, is crucial to Hill’s work. In the newer paintings, elements suggesting weather maps point towards climate change as a source of this internalised anxiety or fear. The work deals with the way complex, chaotic realities are modelled and interpreted through rational systems, and the disconnect that can arise between map and territory in these situations.
By injecting an element of chance and reflexivity into her process, Hill empowers her works to question monovalent, singular visions of the future, instead offering images of networks, congruences, and affinities—opportunities for dialogue and exchange. By invoking the earliest phases of the modernist artistic revolution, when ideas about the role and nature of art and creativity were still plastic and malleable, Hill is perhaps signalling the merits of flux and uncertainty, and the need to internalise this kind of flexible thinking in order to cope with an ever-changing present.
[1] Mikhail Bahktin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (University of Texas Press, 1981), 347, cited in Deborah J. Haynes, Bahktin and the Visual Arts (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 14.
Forecast (Detail)
Forecast (Detail), Ivan Anthony, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, 2016
Anna Smaill
The works of Georgie Hill’s Forecast (Detail) arrive like dispatches from a floating hinterland, or from an aerial archipelago. The communications are extended in a solicitous fashion. They appear, one by one, in opaque but carefully considered order, like colour plates carefully razored from a guidebook and left, mysteriously, on our doorstep. We are both puzzled and flattered by this attempt at communication, this rare homage to our intelligence. We step forward in order to investigate further.
On first glance this landscape seems more than ordinarily made up of clouds. It has its own, changeable weather – pressure systems flicker; storms abound. We can make out both deserts and oases. And in the interior loom vast, partially excavated cityscapes: primitive, modern, shadowless, empty. The spectacle is enchanting, yet we begin to feel dismay also. For, here, alongside the maps, are diagrams, hieroglyphs, codes. They employ an unfamiliar script, the symbols teasing yet unclear. Even as we register this bemusement, however, something shifts.
On inspection, the meanings that were at first obscure begin, gradually, to open... Hill’s work has undergone a metamorphosis. The densely worked organic and patterned forms investigated in Feint (2013) are recast in Circle Remains I and II, yet beside them Hill installs a set of simpler, chromatically vivid fields against stark white backdrops. Moving between these new works feels like taking up temporary residence within a prism. Rich watercolour pigments shift and shuffle and are variously leavened with light until nearly airborne. Windows open into pooled colour in which reds and blues bleed and eddy and lip into each other. Yet, these works – as we might expect from Hill – have high expectations of their viewers. The flickering strategies reveal themselves as we step closer.
Hill’s recent work has investigated circumscription. Yet where in Feint containment suggested withheld violence and the strategic patience of biding one’s time, Forecast presents restraint as an act of kindness. These works have information to impart, but they do so with a degree of care, orchestrating a careful, even cautious, easing into knowledge. Mindful of their responsibility, they seem to echo the textures of a childhood classroom. We glimpse simple tributaries of knowledge: a diagram of the human body with veins and arteries spelt in blue and red ink, the pacific colours of old atlases, the promise of a universal “key” to unlock or decode.
For like an off-kilter phrasebook from an imaginary country, these works double back upon themselves in order to offer up the means to parse their own messages. Teasingly linear patterns appear next to the gridded, excavated colourfields. They float in white space, these diagrams, confident in a language that appears to come either from outer space, or perhaps from a digitised domesticity. They announce a relationship that is at once emphatic and opaque.
Follow this simple guide, they suggest, and all will be clear. We do follow them, and this is where we come across violence at last, dressed in an unexpected colour. Paths of expression and propulsion are corded into the very skin of these works. Hill’s explanatory diagrams literally slice through paper, moving with precision through fibre. In many of these works, these cuts are wilfully exposed, the paper literally flicked out into braided scarring. In others, incisions form conduits for paint, becoming an object correlative for the very idea of expression: a means to convey, but also a product of painful force. This is where Hill’s work implicates us as viewers. We wish to see; to know. Yet, the incisions that promise to explicate are razor sharp. Territories of colour are wounded so that these marks might reach the white territory of the margins, where we dwell. Explication is also excavation. Our knowledge of this benign, clouded, floating landscape relies on a fine dissection.
Detailing the Route Between Order and Chaos
Fluid Structures curated by Francis McWhannell, Parlour Projects, Te Matau-a-Māui Hawke Bay, 2017
Linda Tyler
In his short story “Funes: the memorious”, Borges describes the dizzying world of Ireneo Funes, who, rendered hypersensitive to details by an accident that has left him blind, is now incapable of thinking in the abstract, or generalising: “In the overly replete world of Funes, there was nothing but details, almost contiguous details.” This is a cautionary tale for the devotee of the detail in Georgie Hill’s work. It is possible to become lost in the minutiae of her work – the incisions, the punch holes, the zig zags, the wavering lines – and to mistake the parts for the whole, losing sight of the overall view, the greater weather map or the architectural floor plan. In Funes case, worse than being unable to see the proverbial forest for the trees, he can’t even see the tree for the leaves: “Funes not only remembered every leaf on every tree of the wood, but even every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it.”
The detail has been associated with the ornamental, the effeminate, the decadent, as well as with the everyday, the ordinary, the mundane. These are domains which are traditionally marked as feminine, the very ones abhorred by Viennese art critic and architect Adolf Loos in his influential 1910 manifesto of modernity, Ornament and Crime. There he concluded “No ornament can any longer be made today by anyone who lives on our cultural level ... Freedom from ornament is a sign of spiritual strength.” After modernism, the detail does not occupy a conceptual space beyond the laws of sexual difference, it has become gendered as weak and feminine.
To look at the works from Forecast (Detail) is to run the risk of the detail, to be seduced by its lures. The title of the series of works is borrowed from the science of meteorology developed in the eighteenth century when weather patterns were first plotted and deciphered. While atmosphere and other quantities might still be studied to apprehend the future, Nature as a whole is not easily knowable. Smooth rectangles awash with watercolour tints are snagged by a tangle of lines which unleash the spectre of unpredictability in Georgie Hill’s work.
In cutting into her exquisite Japanese raindrop washi paper with a blade, Hill recalls the work of an animator in Tokyo who cut straight slanting lines into the cellulose to portray a moving image of rain in film. Hill flays her cuts, allowing the fibre of the cotton paper to fan out and blot, accepting the watercolour paint as it bleeds down the clean line of incision. She invites participation in a visible realm which is not limited to the gaze but engages our entire affectivity. In engaging with the physicality of the paper, she cedes control to her materials and enjoys the sensation of cutting into her own painting.
For theorist Julia Kristeva the cut indicates an artwork’s relation to a founding emptiness, providing a link between the spectator and their invisible centre, the unconscious. Hill has always been a fan of the hole, leaving little dots strewn like confetti across her surfaces. In Forecast (Detail), the round holes shift to the outside, acting like pulleys, tugging on the lines that travel the surface to create tension. Her simple geometries and lines are a reference back to the abstract mark making of the earliest artists of the Palaeolithic period uncovered in 1994 in the caves in Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc, Southern France. There simple patterns were overlooked in the excitement to celebrate the recognisable animal forms: “What is generally ignored by the art critics who manage to enter the cave system are the semi circles, lines and zig zag signs marked on the same walls...” observed a recent writer in the New Scientist. Similarly, most scholars have assumed all cave artists were male but a recent study of hand prints established that the mark making had been done by females. Science seems to be telling us that the first artists were women, and that they invented abstraction.
Hill dances around issues of masculinity and femininity in her work, setting up rules and restrictions only to disrupt them. In some works she deploys her characteristic camouflage patterns of protective colouration, combining them with repeating classical meanders and zig-zags. Her colour palette is limited to the primaries – red, yellow, blue. While the daffodil yellow is roughed up by being peeled back in controlled, triangular sections, the red and blue are played off in a less structured fashion. Hill introduces different saturations to show how these pigments change colour with concentration. Pure reds soften as they are watered down and an ultramarine blue drifts off into billowy cyan washes, leaving the viewer adrift in clouds of gender-assigned pink and blue.
These colourful works talk to their white surrounds, addressing the space between the painterly and the precise, detailing a way through from order to chaos and back again.
