Preparing for a solo exhibition

Something I’ve known since I moved into my studio 6 months ago - though only hinted at here and there - is that my residency at PS Art space will culminate in an exhibition.

The clarity of this goal, the definitiveness of my timeline (one year), and the beauty of the exhibition space have been incredible motivators over these past six months. It’s been a privilege to carefully build a body of work over an entire year, nurturing a concept slowly, allowing it to evolve and develop organically. Moreover, I believe that when we are granted a profound opportunity, it’s our duty not to take the easy route, not to do what is merely comfortable, but to challenge ourselves to create something we once might not have believed we were capable of. Similarly, as an artist, I feel it’s my responsibility not to create work that is merely decorative, pretty, or tasteful, but to produce work that confronts, prompts reflection, and ultimately leaves the audience feeling empowered.

My exhibition will be a story of taking flight. Through a collection of classical paintings featuring powerful female protagonists—many in conversation with animal motifs—the exhibition takes the viewer on a journey from recognising the caged nature of modern existence, to grappling with the anger and desperation for protection that comes with it, ultimately culminating in a climactic moment of transcendence.

The exhibition will be anchored in the central concept of the battery hen, a metaphor for modern existence. A battery hen requires only a small space to stand, turn around, flap its wings a little, and eat its feed to fatten up before being sent to slaughter, never realising it possesses wings, albeit clipped. We, too, risk becoming metaphorical battery hens. Literally, the comfort of our homes can become the cages we don’t leave; from them, we can work, access endless entertainment through our screens, and order all manner of food to our doorstep without even meeting the delivery driver. Symbolically, our cages are also our workplaces, financial burdens, and institutions—forces that reinforce the identities we hold, preventing us from taking flight. The fault isn’t entirely our own; many of us are victims of systems much larger than ourselves, systems that profit from keeping us physically and psychologically enslaved. However, not all of us are equally caged. Some have more power to take flight than others, living quite comfortable lives in their cages, free from harm or challenge. But to what extent does our comfort prevent us from realising our full potential or from making the world a freer, fairer, and more beautiful place for everyone?

The biblical story of Judith and Holofernes has become an iconic symbol of female power overthrowing systems of oppression. However, as I’ve discussed on my blog, it is a multilayered story. Judith’s incredible act demonstrates the power of faith to enable us to do the impossible. While the slaying of Holofernes speaks not only to beheading the metaphorical snake that keeps us caged but also to confronting the snake within ourselves.

My contemporary Judith will also feature as a key archetype in the show, but the violent intensity of her symbol needs to be balanced with the light of other heroines. After my grandfather’s passing, a flock of lambs and kids was born on the family farm, reared by my cousin, who has inherited a new role on the farm since Grampy left us. But Nan has always been the dominant matriarch of the family, and the protective, defensive love of a mother is an archetype I want to showcase alongside the assassin’s bravery. While the assassin’s revenge disrupts the systems—both internal and external—that keep us caged, the mother’s nurture shelters the innocent from it.

Svalbard provided another piece to the puzzle: the transcendent. Borrowing the composition from Caravaggio’s Conversion of St. Paul on the Road to Damascus, this work is a self-portrait captured in a moment of surrender within the Arctic tundra. The light is bright and blinding, representing divine knowledge and understanding, with arms open in surrender to this knowledge. The “divine” might symboliae God to some viewers, while to others, it represents the potential we all possess, actualised. Or perhaps the divine is the landscape itself, the power of the sublime to remind us of our true nature.

I invite my viewers to participate in this journey with me as I finalise my body of work over the remaining few months. It’s my hope that by following the backstory as it develops, the impact of the show next year will be even more profound.

Short Story: The Hardworking Man

The alarm sounds as a rooster crows and the hardworking man lifts his head. Behind the blinds the sun is low, the sky cloudless, slate and dun, and it’s time for the hardworking man to prepare himself for the day. He will press the alarm, lift from the bed, tuck sheets beneath mattress, slide feet into slippers and drift towards the washbasin. It’s a Tuesday, 7am, autumn, 18°, but outside the leaves still cling to their branches like leeches.

In his bathroom the hardworking man stares at himself. He hasn’t shaved since Thursday morning and in five days a sparse growth of hair has developed on his chin. He scrubs a bar of hard soap into the scruff until a film of suds form within the hairs. He lifts razor to throat, the blade new and sharp and pulls it mechanically from jugular to chin. The hairs fall like feathers into the basin. The hardworking man dries his face.

Next, the toothbrush. It stands like a sentinel on the vanity, polished and postured with its bristled head at attention. He grips it, squeezes on a neat bead of paste, and brushes, or rather the brush brushes, while the hardworking man stands before his reflection, arm raised, mouth agape, wrist moving back and forth like a metronome. After four minutes the toothbrush lets off a tune and the hardworking man knows it’s time to finish brushing. So, he spits the scum and rinses, splashes his face once more, pats it dry with a herringbone flannel and drifts back into his bedroom.

Outside the sky hasn’t changed from the muted white-to-blue gradient of autumn sunrise, but the air is fresh and so the hardworking man pushes out the window, latches it open a wedge and breathes. He hears the rooster crow, but he does not know from where it comes. Towards the dressing room he drifts, pulling feet from slippers. He selects a navy suit jacket, black trousers, white shirt and paisley tie, which he tightens around his throat, snapping down the collar and gently rolling back his neck along its firm edge. It feels nice. He fastens seven buttons down his front, two at each wrist and relaxes into the same comforting stiffness of fabric around his cuffs.  

Breakfast is a bagel, everything, peanut butter on one half, cream cheese and cucumber on the other. He eats it alongside a cup of home brew, beans from a specialty roaster in Melbourne. It tastes like medicine, smoke and chocolate. As he eats, he watches reads the news: Olympic rivalries, grandma basher, reclaimed vulvas, ghost homes, Biden quits, emu farms, best comedy scenes in the UK, nuclear hope. Scrolls Instagram: Whale breeches, boomerang, baby shower. Checks emails: Survey Closes Tomorrow, Your Express Trip From Saturday Evening, New Comment on Airtable. He flips over his phone and loads plate and cup into dishwasher, fits a tablet of detergent in its slot and presses the button. He drifts to his desk.

His laptop waits dependably in the centre of his desk. He opens it, taps the power button and waits for it to boot. The screen flickers to life. First, he checks emails, prioritises, flags, and responds. The clock strikes 8am, and the hardworking man joins his first virtual meeting. Faces appear on the screen, colleagues framed by their home offices. He nods, listens, contributes when required. The conversation flows around him like water around a rock. The rooster crows again, distant and indistinct. He glances out the window but only sees the same unchanging sky.

After the meeting, he tackles his tasks one by one. Spreadsheets, reports, project updates. He checks off each task with measured satisfaction and rolls his head back, feeling the hardness of his collar massage his neck. He knows he need not wear a collared shirt from his home desk, but the ritual provides a comforting authority that disciplines his torso to sit up straight.

The hardworking man rewards his discipline with lunch - a brief interlude of turkey sandwiches and The Office. He drifts to the kitchen, and onto his sofa, where he sinks into the plush grey leather. For a moment he’s tempted to unbutton his collar, which now digs into his chin as he slumps and feels the chewed bread squeeze between his oesophagus and the rigid band. Sandwich in right hand, he adjusts himself, eyed darting between television and phone, which he scrolls with his left thumb. He takes in neither, but chuckles with the laugh track.

The afternoon vanishes. The hardworking man moves through his day with calm focus, and suddenly it is time to close his screen. He powers down his laptop; first the blackness, then the fading whirr of the fan, finally a low hum evaporates. Outside the white-blue sky is tinged with mandarin, still cloudless, the leaves still clinging to their branches. The hardworking man unbuttons his collar, a rooster crows, he latches the window shut.  

In his room he will undress, wash, brush his hair, slide on slippers. He will not cook tonight. He will select a meal on his phone, dial in his address and wait. When the doorbell rings, he will retrieve the food from his doorstep, take plate, fork, knife, napkins to his grey sofa, sink into the leather. He will watch television, eat with his left hand, scroll with his right. He will laugh with the soundtrack. He will package leftovers into neat plastic containers, unload dishwasher, wash plate, fork, knife. He will say goodnight to his houseplants. Drift to his room.

At the washbasin the hardworking man will greet his toothbrush at attention in its charging port. Sliding off his slippers, the hardworking man will realise he doesn’t remember the last time he wore his outdoor shoes. He will close the blinds. He will sleep.

The alarm will sound.  

Caravaggio, Conversion on the Way to Damascus, 1601

Svalbard: i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

On one of my last nights in Svalbard, I lay awake, the light of the midnight sun still bathing the room of my hostel in a grey cast of light, my neighbouring bunks a melancholy kind of empty. I felt struck by the overpowering feeling that anguish is the one emotion that undercuts all life. When we are born, anguish pierces the shrill of our cry. In the playground, the anguish of abandonment. In autumn, the anguish of a falling leaf. At graduation, there is anguish. At a funeral, there is anguish. On a mountain top, anguish is there. Wherever there is love – for a person, a place, a state of being – there is the anguish in saying goodbye, in letting go, in surrendering to the transience of life. Perhaps anguish is too harsh, too sad to describe the feeling that is far more nuanced in my head and my heart, but it’s the best vocabulary I have to describe so much of how I am and the art I want to make. Anguish is as beautiful as it is painful, it tells us what we care about, what we long for, what we adore. And when anguish is felt deeply and comprehended fully through painting or music or poetry, the art that results is some of the most profound and moving that one can experience. I’ve never ceased my affinity with the devastatingly beautiful painting by August Schenck showing a ewe mourning over her dead lamb, while ravens encircle them, awaiting their feed.

Anguish by August Schenck

Where there is love for a place, there is the anguish in letting it go. And, let me tell you, did I fall in love with Svalbard. I loved the remoteness and the extremeness, the adventure, the simplicity, the colours and the light. And I adored the community, the diversity of stories, spontaneity and curiosity. I fell in love with polar bears and sleeping reindeers and eagle cries, with blackcurrant juice and brown cheese and camping food. The groan of an icebreaker. The beat of a fulmar.

By delaying my writing of my time in Svalbard, I have allowed myself to selfishly indulge in the fantasy that I never left. To daydream of glaciers and fog, to let thoughts wander and meander through memory, to play and pretend, to lay in an endless blue sea, arms and legs outstretched, while life washes over wave, upon wave, upon wave, upon wave. Not writing has meant I haven’t had to acknowledge how time has stretched out like rubber, pulling my present self from the frostnipped, sunkissed me in the Arctic. That as each day passes, I turn back behind myself to look at that precious time, reaching further out than the day before to pluck the precious jewel of memory, delicate and small and beautiful in the crease of my palm. I want to stretch back, like a cat with long arms pawing sunlight, grasp that time and snap the rubber forward so that I blink and I am back in the grey, melancholy gloom of my hostel room. It feels so close and yet so impossible to grasp, like sunlight through fingers.

But it is now June, and recently the rain has returned, the sky has darkened, and I while the rest of the city retreats into the shadow of their houses, I can feel myself unfurling.

Detail of my latest painting, a contemporary reimagining of Judith and Holofernes

Svalbard, the Arctic, the anguish of saying goodbye, England, family, my Grandfather’s grave, my Grandmother’s anguish, the anguish of saying goodbye again, will all feature in the new body of work I am creating as part of my residency at PS Art Space. Many people have asked “Will you paint the Arctic landscape… what about a polar bear?” and the answer is no, not quite, but the energy and feeling of all these places will permeate across the entire collection. Svalbard will not feature as literally in this body of work as Iceland did in my show for Koort Gallery last year, but my time there has been essential to the development of ideas and meanings behind my work. For example, once I let go of the expectation within myself to paint the Arctic landscape, I began to see how the feelings I associate with it (the sublime, passion, transformation, love, anguish) are all still present in my portraits. For example, my work frequently references mythical and Biblical stories, like the Brazen Serpent or St. Jerome at his writing desk, most recently as a reimagining of Judith beheading Holofernes. I’m drawn to these ancient stories for the same reason that I’m drawn to places like the Arctic, because they unite people across centuries in how they evoke eternal truths about our nature as human beings. Whether you follow the Bible or align with a particular mythology or not, the lessons their stories tell us are ones that have remained as relevant now as when they were written, reminding us that we are not more than our nature, and that we are just as capable, and guilty, of destroying ourselves now as we were centuries ago. We may like to think we have evolved and progressed, but our frailties stay with us for eternity. Likewise, when faced with the sublime in places like the High Arctic, we learn the same truths taught in Biblical and Mythological stories through an experiential means. It is one thing to read about the ineffability of the Earth in a story, it is another to experience it. Through experience, the lessons are known rather than merely known. Knowing this, the best thing I feel I can contribute to the world is to remind ourselves of these lessons by moving people through painting. Thus, while my reimagining of Judith and Holofernes doesn’t literally depict the Arctic tundra, it does speak to the urgency of survival and the passion of the sublime.

The other major component to this new body of work is the motif of the battery hen. There are, of course, no chickens on Svalbard (and no, the ptarmigan does not count), but there are plenty of people, and one thing that struck me was that if people are battery hens, many of the people on Svalbard are battery hens that have taken flight. Without knowing too much about the community, one thing that was clear was the shared sense of resilience, adventure and freedom that permeate the people who live on or consistently visit the island. One of the most obvious reasons for this is the harsh nature of the place. Polar night shrouds Svalbard in the gloom of eternal darkness for four months of the year, while the midnight sun illuminates it in a single 4-month long day in the opposite season. There is limited healthcare and housing, no bank, no agriculture and all supplies must be shipped into the island. And yet Svalbard is a visa-free zone, so anyone could hypothetically live there provided they have a place to stay and funds to support themselves. But in every other way, it’s a difficult place to live. You must have a special kind of determination if you want to stay. For some people that determination is fuelled by a desperate affinity with the wilderness, a curiosity for adventure, or a commitment to research, for others, it’s escape from war. The people I met ranged from artists to PhD students, mushers and skippers, miners to chefs and mechanics. Most poignantly, a Ukrainian soldier at war on his 2-weeks rest and relaxation. His life’s wish was to see polar bears in the Arctic, so when a bear appeared dancing and running along the edge of the sea ice, we photographed it together from the starboard of Henningsen’s icebreaker until it finally disappeared into the white haze like a ghost. When I got back, two Russian nationals welcomed me into my accommodation, kind and timid and gentle. They had fled the war and all they wished for was safety and to share the beauty of their beloved Arctic with their guests. That night I couldn’t sleep, kept awake by the devastating knowing that anguish permeates all life.

A distant bear on sea ice, captured by Svyatoslav

The people of Svalbard inspired me to live my life with the same attitude of resilience, adventure and freedom. Alongside my major paintings, I’m creating a series of battery hens in flight. They’ll be visual motifs throughout the gallery space, calling the viewer to reflect on ideas about transformation, ascendence and the physical and cognitive barriers that keep us enslaved. My hope is that the metaphor of the battery hen will empower viewers to consider the systems of control that prevent our transformation and ascendance, that keep us divided, that keep us at war with one another, that fatten us up for the slaughter, so that we never realise our full potential, so that we sleepwalk through life without fully comprehending it’s beauty - even if anguish is present. The aim is to add to my own mythology of the human story, while building on the same stories that have defined and guided us for centuries. I might have left Svalbard, but Svalbard, and the lessons it taught me, have never left me; it’s in my heart and it’s in my work. I can hear ee cummings whisper in my ear: Svalbard: i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

Creativity in an Anaesthetised World: A Phenomenological View

Our experience of the outer world is inherently creative. When subjective perception penetrates the objective, physical world, it engenders a novel creation within the consciousness of the subject, which then emanates into the world in various forms – be it as a cognitive notion, a physical act, or as an abstract form of energy. The nature of the creation is phenomenological, perpetually novel because the experience cannot be replicated by the subject nor recreated by someone else. Think, for example, of your happiest memory - exhibiting in a major show, seeing Richard Ashcroft perform Bittersweet Symphony live, drinking cocktails in Santorini - now consider how futile it is to exactly recreate that memory because its phenomenological essence depends on so many unique factors colliding at the time of your experience. Not only the recent and historical context, the weather, setting (physical and temporal), sounds and smells but also the uniqueness of your physical body, comprising bone density, muscle mass, heart rate and metabolic processes, alongside the precision of your senses in discerning taste, texture, auditory frequencies and the full spectrum of light and colour, all significantly influence your aptitude for perceiving the external world when that experience takes place. The next exhibition, the same show in a different city, a second round of cocktails in Oia will all be inherently new phenomenological creations in the mind of the individual. In that sense, by merely existing and perceiving the world around us, we are all artists.

How did I end up here?

Martin Heidegger demonstrated the consequences of this in his philosophy of phenomenology. He claimed that our engagement with the external world is informed by the historical context of human existence and our positioning within the broader fabric of the world. This ‘historicity’ says that human existence is characterised by an intricate intertwinement with the past, present, and future, profoundly shaping our self-conception and our perception of the external world. This is why each generation is grouped based on stereotypes of attitudes, values and behaviours; they are shaped by their circumstances, and so too is their phenomenological experience of the world. For instance, the conclusion of World War II in 1945 ushered in a prevailing sentiment of estrangement, despair, and disillusionment, encapsulating the modern human experience which also coincided with the burgeoning influence of technology, radically transforming human interaction with the world. The post-war surge in technological advancement epitomised a mode of human conduct characterised by a pursuit of order, control, and exploitation, wherein individuals were moulded into ceaseless consumers, enslaving them on both a psychological and, consequently, phenomenological level. The Strauss-Howe Generational Theory can build our understanding of this further; depending on a person’s age post-war, whether in childhood, young-adulthood, midlife or elder hood, the general role they had to play would shift from the prophetic youngsters rapt with the urge to build a better future, to the reclusive nomads, war-weary and tired.

Yet, like clockwork, we find ourselves moving towards another cycle of crisis, one where the threat of alienation sensed during the mid—century is even more profound. Heidegger particularly feared technology, aware of how it endangers the richness of human experience, diminishing our ability to sense the external world and divorcing us from the genuine essence of our being. It begs the question, if our phenomenological experience of the outer world is inherently creative, then what happens to creation when experience is anaesthetised? In our recent historical context of war, pandemics, corruption and fear, compounded by doomscrolling, novelty and reward anticipation and infinite content online, it is easy to become like Ray Bradbury’s grey phantoms, shuffling wearily from kitchen to bedroom to living room in our tomblike houses. We still experience phenomena, but the saturation, volume and temperature has been dialled down to zero.

The role of the artist, like the philosopher, is to recognise how our historical context is influencing our phenomenological experience of the world. We must recognise that our mere existence is a rebellious act of creation itself, punctuating reality with new notions, acts and energies rather than being at the mercy of the machine of the outer world. Historically, artists (and remember, we are all artists) have had the wonderful gift and crucial role of being the world’s journalists, storytellers, time-travellers and prophets. But currently, artists face an immense challenge of navigating a world more interconnected and yet more polarised than ever. In such a time, artists must do more than merely interpret the world, they must be providers of criticism, hope and beauty.

Experiencing the sublime – that intoxicating feeling of terror that comes from standing in the face of the immense force of nature -can be a powerful antidote to our prevailing state of anaesthesia. To stand in the shadow of a centuries-old-glacier, a great, slumbering beast that etches its passage through the Earth by sheer mass and force, is to feel terrifyingly alive. Witnessing enormous icebergs break off a glacial facade, banded with blackened soil from volcanic eruptions that spouted centuries before, is to feel terrifyingly temporary. And to see those bergs, as big as apartment blocks, float into the Arctic Ocean, gradually dissolving into resplendent, crystalline sculptures, to rest on far sands for a few hours before disappearing back into the Earth, is to feel terrifyingly mortal. The extraordinary nature of this encounter evokes the need to create in anyone who experiences it. The extreme nature of the sublime is what will guide us back to the true nature of our being

Melissa Clements

The incomprehensible urge to curl up inside an ice cave

1 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).

2 Ray Bradbury, “The Pedestrian,” in The Golden Apples of the Sun (New York: Doubleday, 1953), 73-80.

Surrender: What I learnt hiking up a mountain at 78° north

For most of us who live outside the polar regions, darkness is promised every day when the sun sets and cloaks the neighbourhood in the gloom of dusk. For others it still manifests in the blackout of a theatre, dark recesses of a cupboard, or when we close our eyes to dream. For many, darkness is a source of fear, disguising our surroundings, allowing the possibility for anything that lurks. For me, darkness is womblike.

Confrontation of the Brazen Serpent, Melissa Clements, 2022. The blackness in the background gives the eye a place to rest and contemplate the subject matter

When I paint portraits, I often frame my subjects in darkness too. From the blackness of a flat and dark background, brightly lit and dynamically posed figures can emerge like phantoms. In Confrontation of the Brazen Serpent, I’ve painted myself holding a red-bellied black snake, a meditation on Moses’s Old Testament transformation of a serpent into brass. As the snake strikes violently at my face, which is focussed and stern, the eye finds a place to rest in the murkiness of the background, navigating through it with their intellect. The quality of this darkness is not dazzling like other values and hues, it doesn’t blind or distract the viewer like a high key primary colour, or the starkness of white. In “blacking out” parts of the picture to erase and destroy, what remains contains the value of whatever I was feeling, often ideas associated with the interior, justice and analysis. So, when I first experienced a white out, I felt absolutely, totally destabilised.

Hiking Trollsteinen

Two days after I arrived in Longyearbyen, a small village of around 2500 people at 78° north, I was booked to hike up Trollsteinen with a local guide. Trollsteinen is an 850m high peak cloaked in snow and ice, hiding behind the white fog and smaller peaks of the Longyear Valley. Although not especially high, Trollsteinen is one of the harder day hikes you can book from Longyearbyen, approximating six-seven hours if you include a stop in the ice cave on the way down. The hike is split into three sections beginning with a twisting ascent up the moraine, before crossing the Larsbreen glacier and making the final, steep hike to a summit capped by the enormous “Troll Stone” from which the mountain gains its name. I knew it would be tough, maybe even reckless considering my lack of experience hiking in snow, but I booked it anyway.

Longyearbyen is a small village on Svalbard at 78° north, made up of around 2500 people

I dressed as you’d expect for the Arctic Circle: thermals, mid layer, outer coat, buff, beanie, liner gloves, outer gloves, hiking boots and an extra wool jumper in my backpack, which also stocked hand warmers, my Leica, sunglasses and a packet of biltong. At 9am Martin from Svalbard Wildlife Expeditions picked me up in a little yellow and red van with five other hikers and we travelled down to the guide lodge dodging pot holes as we went. Here each of us were fitted with crampons for the icy terrain, a thermos and dehydrated packet of chicken curry and a hard hat and headlight for the ice cave. We also met Tequila, our lovely blue and brown eyed white husky, polar bear spotter and moral support animal with the strength to pull any of us up the mountain if necessary. I decided then that I wasn’t going to let that happen, no matter my exhaustion or how adorable Tequila was. I wanted to make it to the top of that mountain even if it destroyed me. A quick look at the map and we left for the start point, the end of the road at Nybyen, just above sea level. Trollsteinen was not yet visible, still hidden behind the equally menacing cliff faces looming over Longyear Valley, “Where we’re hiking is about twice the height of that,” said Martin, pointing to the largest visible mountain at the end of the valley, which rose like a sheer and sharpened arrowhead.

Section one of the hike up Trollsteinen is a moraine landscape, see the tiny people in the centre for scale.

It ended up being one of the toughest things I’ve ever done. I write that now with a grin on my face, but combine the difficulty of the hike with jet lag, broken sleep amid midnight sun and waffles for breakfast and I felt totally incapable of getting myself up that mountain. Each step was an agonising effort. Left foot up, left foot down, left foot sinks 30cm into snow, snow fills boot, right foot up, right foot down, right foot sinks 20cm into snow, snow misses top of boot, lift left foot up 30cm higher to lift left foot out of snow, step forward, left foot sinks 40cm into snow, repeat at agonising pace, watch distance from group mates grow. My internal monologue swiftly and hilariously shifted between “yep this is fine, easy even,” to “How the hell did I get on the side of this god forsaken mountain?” At my lowest point I questioned “I wonder what would happen if I just pretended to fall down the side of the ridge and slide back home to the guesthouse like my bum is a sled?” I’ve never felt so terribly weak and bad at something in my life.

We stopped for biscuits after crossing the glacier and the hot solbær we drank was an injection of energy which I burnt off just as rapidly as it manifested once we began the final ascent. This part of the hike felt impossibly steep and the height was made more dizzying by how rapidly the visibility declined. At this altitude the snow was powdery, soft and deep. I followed the footsteps of the hikers before me, carefully wedging my foot in each imprint, the compacted snow building a staircase that etched the only mark on the endless white of the mountain face. I forced each leg up one slow step after slow step.

Every now and then a glint of sun, or shift in the hue of sky will break the white out, revealing gorgeous threads of colour and light.

White out

Around 3/4 of the way up the mountain, the intoxicating blue of sky faded into a haze of cloud, first a veil of silver, quickly a thick fog of white. The white out engulfed us before I could even comprehend which foot was where and what my breath was doing. Like the first time I saw a glacier 18 months before, experiencing a white out for the first time took me by surprise, and with it, my breath. Picture the familiar sensation of darkness; nighttime, the theatre, your wardrobe, before dreaming, and imagine that instead of darkness cloaking your senses, it’s an all consuming, unfathomable light. On occasion, a glint of sunlight would break through the cloud, or the sky would shift to a hue of darker grey, revealing threads of colour and light. But mostly, it’s white, white, everywhere. Aside from the visibility of hands, legs, feet and arms, a total white out is non-bodily, and yet, the whiteness itself is hardly empty. It’s composed of spirit and energy and in it you are enveloped in oneness.

Among the denseness of the fog, my body totally exhausted and breath hard to catch, I suddenly felt suffocated by an all-consuming panic. Nothing was real, and yet everything felt connected. It was beautiful and strange and at any moment I felt I might slip and fall off the edge of the path, down the ridge, into the abyss. But we still had another 150 meters or so to the top, and although it was less steep, the path to the summit was a challenging 50cm wide walk way, with a sheer drop on either side, all of it cloaked behind fog. My legs felt like wood. My throat closed. I needed to get off the mountain. “I can strap her to you if you like, she’s pretty good at helping people up,” Martin said. But I carried on, one slow step after slow step.

Even Tequila was frozen at the summit

The temperature at the summit was -12°C, accounting for wind chill, and the white out persisted. For the most part, there was no visibility beyond a cloak of white, but in some directions specks of grey and blue could be seen in the distance, faint indications of neighbouring peaks. This was the coldest I felt the whole time I was in Svalbard. My fingers prickled with numbness and even Tequila grew a frosty beard of white around her muzzle and whiskers. I slumped against the base of the Troll Stone and let my body collapse into the snow. My ego was shattered. The mountain had made me feel weak, incapable and inescapably mortal. The panic, the terror, the breathlessness on the ridge was one part exhaustion, a large part my own human fragility and I hated how it made me feel. But that sensation is one I now relish, it taught me one of the biggest lessons all humans need to learn: We are not bigger than nature, not our inner nature nor the sublime nature of the planet and universe. I sat at the summit, cold and fragile and small, let myself be engulfed by the light and observed as the fear and panic of my ego transformed into a blissful surrender.

I reached the summit and was thrilled to learn that the journey down was indeed via bum-sled, almost all 850m of it.

Reflections

I was in a daze the next morning, mulling over the experience on my daily walk into the village. When considering the concept of surrender, I realised I couldn’t paint it with the same darkness of my shadowy portraits. All these works have an intellectual focus, referencing mythological or biblical stories, or alluding to existentialist notions. “Blacking out” sections of my paintings offers a gentle space for the eye to rest and get lost in contemplation, but the surrender of a white out doesn’t allow this. A white out is blinding, it doesn't give you room to think, it’s without thought. I’m reminded of Brett Whiteley’s Alchemy which follows the journey towards awakening. From bodily, visceral existence in the right, to golden serenity in the left, a monolithic “IT” holds the fulcrum at the point of transformation.

Alchemy, Brett Whiteley, 1972-73

I love painting dark, shadowy, philosophical portraits. They feel important and necessary. In painting them I purge feelings and thoughts, often despair and anguish, fear and rage, but also more mellow moods of nostalgia, yearning and curiosity and hope that they offer the viewer the same. But there remains another part of the story of life that needs investigating; the part that we are kept isolated from when we are trapped in the safe comfort of our homes. When we brush our teeth and tie our shoes, when we catch the bus and sit down at the computer, when we turn on Netflix and go to sleep, and wake up 50 years later while, in the meantime, wars have been waged with money we go to work for. This is the part where the bodily, logical and dark, is transformed into the spirit, sensation and light. It’s here where we can be free from the psychological enslavement of modernity and the sleepwalking through life that prevents us from reaching our full potential, as individuals and as a society. For Brett Whiteley, it was akin to transforming iron into gold.

It’s mountains like Trollsteinen that everyone ought to hike, particularly our leaders, particularly in a white out. Mountains like Trollsteinen which don’t tickle the ego, the kind that you do not conquer, but the kind that conquer you. It was there, atop the ridge, shin deep in snow, the horizon a ribbon of weightless steel among the white, my body and breath dissolving into the haze, that I had my “IT” moment.

The Incomprehensible Urge to Curl up Inside an Ice Cave, Melissa Clements, 2022

Midnight sun and the promise that night will return

On April 19th the sun set for the last time in Longyearbyen, commencing their season of midnight sun. For the next 4 months this little village at 78° north will be bathed in sunlight for 24 hours of the day as the arctic tundra, almost indistinguishable from the white sky, slowly reveals itself in scars of blue-grey. By August 23rd, the valley will be moss-covered, the white-coated reindeer fattening for polar night.

Living under constant daylight is obviously an unusual experience.  I haven’t been here for nearly long enough to make any meaningful judgement about how it affects the psyche, but the village shows clues of what life is like.  Many homes have the odd window masked with aluminium foil, and 24hr time is a must – a local told me they’ve arrived at work 12 hours early on at least one occasion. Constant light makes it difficult to switch off - it’s a mentally taxing environment to live in.

Longyearbyen is a town of approximately 2500 people, wedged in the Longyearbyen valley between the mountains of Platåberget and Gruvefjellet

Since I’ve arrived in Longyearbyen, midnight sun has made me reflect on ideas of resilience, surrender, transformation and the cyclical reality of time. I expect images of the tundra will make it into my exhibition at PS next year, but this trip is mostly important for the ideas it informs. When I went to Iceland in 2022, I was tuned into feelings of freedom, euphoria and rest, but this trip is different. I feel too impassioned, we are in a pivotal moment in history, a moment of crisis, but if midnight sun has taught me anything so far, it’s that it’s not worth fearing the daylight, but that the daylight will never end.

Nevertheless, even night will come again.

The fjord where Longyearbyen is situated froze over this year for the first time in 20 years

The cyclical nature of time is something the West has grown to resist. William Strauss and Neil Howe explain that we typically follow a linear view of time in the West in which we perceive time as constantly moving forward. We value progress and growth, and it means that anything can happen and that when it does, we feel especially significant because we feel it has never happened before. It means technology is invented and the world is interconnected beyond comprehension, it also means war and crisis and catastrophe and the belief that this moment is the “it” moment when it all reaches a cataclysmic peak. It’s terrifying because when time is linear, anything goes, midnight sun might not end this year, the crisis we are living through is something we all played a role in marching humanity towards. Alternatively, history tells us that crisis has happened before and will continue to happen every century or so. While it does not justify nor bring comfort or relief to crisis, war crimes and injustice occurring at the hands of criminal corporations, governments and elites around the world, it does teach us an important lesson – after crisis, there is always a high, after winter, flowers will bloom, after midnight sun, night will come again. Linear time, a narcissistic Western invention fools us into believing that the criminal path our leaders are taking us down right now is a permanent, uncontrollable, endless progression forward. Knowledge of cyclical time teaches us that even tyrants aren’t immune from change, transformation, mortality, and rebirth after destruction.

I don’t have the answer to crisis. Like many people, I feel snowed (right now, quite literally) under the weight of wars funded by our tax dollars, pandemics mismanaged by leaders who work for us, violence waged on innocent people fuelled by a system that is totally broken. Perhaps that’s why I find myself so drawn to the ends of the earth – on the individual level, our everyday complaints feel so petty atop a mountain peak, but it also makes me even more enraged because I’m certain we wouldn’t be in this mess if our leaders came face to face with glaciers, were forced to climb them, feeling weak and miniscule and fragile while navigating exhaustion and windchill and the terrifying reality that one slip and that’s it.

The whiteout experienced during the ascent up Trollsteinen was totally destabalising and totally spectacular

Nature feels like such an antidote, and yet once again, it and our spiritual connection to it is being destroyed. If humanity is doomed to repeat itself, so be it, but surely this crisis feels so massive because we’ve forgotten how cycles happen so when this crisis has come about we were not prepared, not tuned into the stories of our ancestors and maybe, the people who led us into the crisis knew that the perfect way to wage war and control is to make us forget the cycles and lessons that prevent tyrants from ruling for too long.

I realise this blog is a bit dark considering I’m in one of the most mesmerising places on the planet, but honestly it doesn’t feel that way. We know this is happening, let’s talk about it. Firstly, forget the notion that the ordinary person is responsible for the crises the world is facing, we mustn’t succumb to that unfair burden, it only makes us weak and less able to act. What we can do is take responsibility for our free will, protect the people we love, build strong families and meaningful connections with friends and neighbours, practice the virtues of grace, kindness and generosity, remember that our essence is not physical, let go of fear but not of passion where passion is due. Don’t let them make us battery hens, the night will come again and that’s when dreams come alive.

Red velvet, rooster feathers and a shining blade

Things have been taking off this month, maybe not as quickly as I’d have liked, but the wheels are off the ground and I’m making a steady ascent. Shortly after I wrote my February blog, Studio 7 transformed into the set of something you might see in Game of Thrones. Red velvet, rooster feathers, a shining blade, blood (costume), warm light. With the help of the most talented Kate from Lovely One Photography, and Xavier and Stef from PS, I watched as the visual of a scene I’d imagined for several years was acted out on my workbench.

The next day the photos came through: Gorgeous golden light, the glint of silver, a blur of copper feathers, faces of rage, determination, urgency, terror, focus. The images told a centuries old story of revenge and justice, interlaced with new associations I’ve imprinted from my contemporary experience. It was Judith beheading Holofernes, but it was also a woman extinguishing her demons, a prisoner breaking free, a civilian executing a tyrant. The story is violent and universal, but it’s also quiet and philosophical.

These are the stories I love to tell in my art. They’re stories that make people think and reflect, but only after they’ve been confronted with immediate and powerful feeling.

In the studio with Stef and Xavier, shooting with Lovely One Photography for the next major painting

A painting like this calls for a large canvas – 140x100cm to be exact – which should fill a big gap on the walls of PS quite nicely for my show next year. But I’ve also been enjoying working on my miniatures this month (including one not much larger than a passport photo). Think of the miniatures as journaling, it’s a ritual of mental hygiene that I need to complete before I can focus on bigger and more complex storytelling. Alongside studio work this month, I’ve also completed a residency at Perth College, commenced a painting course with 11 students, all while confronting real grief and loss for the first time. It’s taken a lot of mental hygiene to make it through March.

Everything in life has an opposite and equal force, the dark and the light, the good and the evil, the micro and the macro, the sublime and the mundane. I value both in equal measure and the complex, wild scene of my next major painting tells a story of humanity just as valid as the mundane, daily realities of modern living. The mundane is the hidden, disguised, stored away emotion that we aren’t used to seeing on gallery walls, but it’s this that we feel most often, it’s the troughs experienced in-between the menacing peaks depicted in my major work.

Miniature painting allows me to invest all my feeling into a tiny space, it’s a mediative process. This piece is just larger than a passport photo.

Mulling things over from 35,000ft

February was a month of rest and preparation, necessary, I think, before indulging in a year
of art making that I hope will see me create my most ambitious work yet.

The month started with taking Sampling Stylidium dichotomum near Whistlepipe Gully to the framer, which has totally finished off the piece, before jetting off to Thailand for two weeks of exploration and self-reflection. It came at a good time, though I must admit it was hard to pull myself away from the studio so soon after moving in. The reason it came at a good time, though, was because it forced me to pause and reflect on how I was going to spend this year at PSAS.

Previously, I’ve had a terrible habit of getting so excited and fixated on an idea for a painting, that I began making it without pausing at all. My trip to Thailand brought a lot of benefits and wonderful experiences, but in terms of my art practice, it made me step away from the studio at a point when my ideas were so fertile that I was ready to execute them instantly. What I learnt was if these ideas were still hanging around while I’m snorkelling with reef sharks or eating Khao Soi or on a scooter in Chinatown, then they’re probably worth painting. If they don’t, then life has done a great job of editing down my ideas to the ones that don’t matter and the ones that really do.

Longboats were the best and most efficient form of transport throughout the Krabi Province in Thailand

In particular, I find that the time on an airplane, after altitude has been reached and everyone has settled in and finished their evening meal, attempting to sleep, is when my ideas are most potent. It’s the isolation of being in a metal tube in the middle of oblivion, totally unreachable and totally surrendered to a lack of control, that I feel wholly free to let my mind wander and race and explore and dream up all the wildest painting concepts. While some ideas hung around, new ideas sprung up, and when we landed at our destinations, it was fascinating to watch which ideas remained.

So, what has stuck around? The first is an idea that’s not just dominated my thoughts for two weeks across Thailand, but for the last two years. It’s inspired by a famous image from the Old Testament, and the subject of many paintings throughout art history. It’s a gruesome beheading, at the hands of woman enlivened by the holy spirit. It’s a scene that is so violent, and so bound up in history and legend, that is feels merely a story in the psyche of the people who see it. But these stories remain relevant, they cut through history and continue as messages of injustice, freedom, truth and power that demand to be felt. These stories, whether Biblical, mythological or legendary are stories about humanity, in all its gut-wrenching destruction and beauty.

I feel called to make this particular painting for several reasons. My work is often philosophical and quiet, but for a while I’ve been having this recurring dream where I’m pulling stuff outside of myself – gunk and rope and oil – and I know that it’s because I need to make my art scream and shout, like Judith with the head of Holofernes.

The truth is I’m enraged about how our society is systematically set up to keep people enslaved, whether literally or psychologically. Our freedoms and liberties, culture and communities are held between the thumb and forefingers of powerful people who could crush them whenever they wish. And us, with our Netflix and our beaches and our BBQ’s and beer, are quite happy to maintain that dynamic so long as, like fattened battery hens, we have the things that keep up fed and rested and entertained.

The paradox of being on pristine tropical beaches in Thailand, while sensing this so deeply, is not lost on me, and I’m battling how to feel about it all. The best way I know how is to paint it, so that’s what I’m going to do.

Judith Slaying Holofernes by Artemesia Gentileschi, 1614-18

Building a creative sanctuary

I’ve always strongly sensed how the environment we’re in shapes the art we produce. A small studio might constitute small works, a big studio would allow for expansive paintings and sculpture. A bright an airy space might inform a desire for whimsical watercolour, and a dark, moody lit space might call for dramatic tableaus. Whatever the nature of the environment, if I can’t cultivate a sanctuary of creation, I find it difficult to fully surrender myself to the vulnerability of making art. This month, my primary goal has been to transform studio 7 into the place that I crave to come to work in. While I was sad to say goodbye to my old warehouse studio in Northbridge, I’ve taken pleasure in boxing up my things, and rearranging them in their new home; coloured pencils and cartridge paper, boxes and jars and notepads and polaroid photographs, standing easels and table easels and tiles glued together with paint. It’s tiring moving spaces, but once the paintings are hung, books shelved, jars stacked, paint arranged, fairy lights strung, it all becomes worth it, and the creation flows effortlessly.

I can’t stress enough how grateful I feel for the opportunity to make studio 7 my own over the next year. Now that it’s feeling like home, the work is already flowing abundantly. January concluded with the completion of my first major painting of 2024, titled Sampling Stylydium dichotomum near Whistlepipe Gully. It’s a portrait of my friend Diana, a freelance Field Botanist and Conservationist, working across regional Western Australia and Southeast Asia. I met Diana over ten years ago, she was a year late starting high school after her family’s yacht became shipwrecked in Micronesia, where they lived with the local people while her father rebuilt their boat. The lessons of sustainability, curiosity and respect for the natural world she learned in childhood have informed Diana’s advocacy for botanical conservation. Her work in Western Australia involves projects that waypoint and map rare flora around the state to ensure that development doesn’t encroach on populations of threatened plants. I was honoured to join Di on a seed collecting trip in the Perth Hills, where she identified endless plant species by name, carefully explaining their phytotomy, relationship with the larger ecosystem and the importance of botanical diversity. The snake at Di’s heart is Bart, her Python, who is also a good friend of mine, “For me, the gentleness of snakes is a reminder not to be afraid of nature; animals and plants are not scary and it’s our job to protect them.” In 2023, Diana began working on a seed collection program in Nam Kan National Park in northern Laos, researching the propagation of fruiting tree species crucial to the foraging of the critically endangered Crested gibbon.

Sampling Stylydium dichotomum near Whistlepipe Gully, oil on panel and acrylic

Compositionally, the portrait echoes the same concepts I was exploring in my 2023 solo exhibition To Rest on Far Sands. I’ve included a mirrored cut-out at the centre of the painting, where Bart features. These mirrored fragments are metaphors and they aid the story. The colour palette is very different though, since the landscape is Australian, I’ve chosen warm, Earthy hues and pared back and erased areas with black. I find it easier to paint arctic, icy landscapes in realism, rather than the Australian outback, because the outback is so uncanny, wild and untamed. It’s easier for me to evoke this through painterly shapes and marks rather than as perfect likeness. Perhaps that’s because the outback still feels so alien to me, something that none of us as outsiders can really pin down and fully feel at home in - but then again surely the arctic sublime should be the same. Regardless, this process of rendering figures in realism, and the landscape in abstracted forms seems to be working, and I’m pleased with the outcome.

Diana’s portrait is an interesting start to the studio 7 residency, because I’m not sure how much I’ll continue working with external figures outside of my immediate circle (Myself, and my family) when building an exhibition concept for January 2025. The problem with major portraits like Diana’s, is that the story told is so huge and so singular, that is almost deserves an exhibition of its own, or at the very least to be in an exhibition of other, equally as profound portraits. I’m not sure how Diana would fit in alongside a body of work that tells a unified message. I keep coming back to the notion of psychological landscapes and figures in the landscape, perhaps that’d work, but this idea doesn’t feel pinned down enough. On the other hand when I do try to pin it down further, thinking specifically about my personal relationship with Australia and the UK, where I grew up, I’m worried that including paintings like Diana’s would make the exhibition feel like a jumble of separate ideas.

I don’t know what to do about this yet. My solution for now is to just keep making work – work that I love, work that moves me – and I am trusting that in the process an exhibition concept will float to the surface. Some things I do know – I’m going to Svalbard and the UK in April and May for a painting trip. I’ll spend a week in Longyearbyen, the worlds’ northernmost town, during which I’ll be capturing content and sketching, then I’ll take what I gather to a cabin in the south of Hampshire, where I’ll begin making some paintings. The intention is to produce at least something – 10 paintings, 4 paintings, 1 painting – that will make it into the final body of work. Until then, I have a few months to keep producing work and reflecting on my vision. I still want to do major portraits of people I love and admire, but I’m also surrendering to the idea that not every painting needs to tell the full story, that it’s actually essential for room to be left for the viewer to interpret the story in their own minds as they journey through the exhibition. That’s why the quality of a show sometimes is seen in the quantity of the paintings, however paradoxical that feels to say.

In the end, I want a beautiful show that says something profound, and I want there to be at least 3 major paintings that grab the viewers’ attention and barely lets them go. They viewer will complete the story through the fragments of remaining paintings throughout the exhibition. It’ll be an exhibition about existence, beauty and life (3 very interwoven ideas), and I trust that it’ll come together because of the sanctuary it’s being created in.