Late in 2019, Melbourne’s established digital printmaker, Sophia Szilagyi, was invited by The Royal Botanic Gardens of Sydney to create and exhibit her artistic response to the living plants in this iconic public garden. Szilagyi immersed herself in the heritage listed oasis, getting to know its landscape and the plants. ‘Plants like people’, she says ‘have an individual presence, a spirit of their own’. 

This body of work invites the viewer to feel the powerful, romantic expression of the plants and the landscape, beyond just their shape and form. By documenting their ever-present past, Szilagyi encourages the viewer to experience their metaphysical realm.

Otomys Contemporary’s Megan Dicks speaks with Harriet Goodall about her practice.

A sensitivity and lifelong connection to the Australian land is so brilliantly revealed in your work as a full-time sculptor. Tell us about your early years growing up on the land?

I was a child of the bad drought of the 80s and dramatic dust storms often rolled in, over the flat plains that stretched out west from our dry front lawn. Our property was several thousand acres and boasted the last rocky hills for the next few hundred kilometres so our favourite childhood play place was an actual bushrangers hideout in the eucalyptus shaded boulders. I have never seen ‘big sky’ sunsets so intense as sitting on those granite rocks. 

The corrugated iron shearing shed was the playground of my youth. Mostly we worked in the shed yards, moving large mobs of sheep with kelpies and motorbikes or walking up laneways but always scratching in the dirt with a stick and picking up treasures along the way. Boredom bred a close study of my surroundings. My father and grandfather were farmer-graziers so summer was 24-hour harvest time with huge headers circling in the heat of the night, spotlights making tracks through the crops. Afterwards we ‘burnt off’ the stubble with flaming tires pulled behind our truck. Dad was Captain of the local fire brigade so he was often called out to fight fires on forty degree Christmas days. Most days were a cycle of tension and relief; disasters were common and we all pulled together. 

My parents were creative thinkers and aesthetically sensitive. It was always implicit that art was the best way to capture the secret language of the land. They often had creative friends to stay and my aunt was a full-time abstract colourist working in oils and we were at all of her Sydney openings. My first welded sculpture of a small horse was made in my father’s farm workshop at age 8. It still sits on their mantelpiece. His workshop was a place to connect.

Your sculptures are made from natural found materials, so your art supplies are simply all around you, however I imagine they are not easily foraged. Your meticulous consideration of the colors and surfaces must be the beginning of a time-consuming process.

My eyes are trained now to look in a different way; I am always searching for rich colours in abandoned or decayed places. As I travel around the bush, I am compelled to explore where many fear to tread! I like the eerie echo of lives passed, the sadness of the scrapheap and when I find a relic and I know it is unloved, I can give it a new life. Of all the pieces I work with, I am very conscious of the origin and can usually remember exactly when and where it was discovered. 

I particularly relish pulling down and repurposing hinge-joint fence lines and netting because they represent so well the boundaries my ancestors declared to claim ownership. The intersecting lines are beautiful to a basket maker and weaver. My husband is a farmer and fencer so it’s part of our world.

Burnt-out cars on the road side have also been a long-time fascination with their unusual patina and swirling colours. The frisson is in the danger element; that these symbols of wealth and prosperity have been stolen and torched – that ownership denied in an instant.  I have been given permission to explore a vintage car yard burnt in the recent bushfires – a vast hundred acres of rusting hulks – the life’s work of a hoarder destroyed. It is post-apocolyptic and devastating in so many ways.  Often time creates aerial landscapes on the rusty surfaces. I only collect materials that have the most beautiful marks and rich variety.  

Cutting, welding and grinding is hard on my body and often dirty and I don’t think many people would enjoy the stuff I do but I don’t begrudge the freedom it grants me to immerse myself in making art. 

The repetitive nature of weaving or even simply connecting pieces is antithetical to the flurry of an inspired moment when resolving a composition. I envy the abstract expressionist painter, splashing and rubbing the canvas with passion but it is good for my busy mind that once I have an idea, I am then forced into hours and hours of slow monotonous action. It makes me still myself and is a discipline that always bears fruit. 

Your selected natural materials are then bent, twisted and woven to express the temper of the Australian land. Following this recent intense season of drought, fire and flood which you were greatly impacted by, I’m particularly intrigued by the gentle delicacy of ‘Willawarrin Backroads’ which floats loosely above in its own shadows, almost obscuring any sense of tension or drama.

I collected the section of hingejoint fence in this piece from a scorched fireground at Willawarrin on the mid north coast of NSW in January while my husband was at home preparing our house and animals for the threat of the Morton fire not far to the South. It was very wild and frightening for everyone but fortunately this fire stopped short of us in Kangaroo Valley. 

The very slight gradation of black-browns and lack of colour is apparent in all the many burnt landscapes I have travelled through and the wending lines woven through my work are a theme I began years ago in a representation of topography. These then became somewhat more like the scribbly lines of insects under bark. It seems the only living creature left in the all the quiet burnt areas are the insects.   This piece is like a tribal relic, a skeleton of something you might find left behind in a post-disaster world. 

Your sculpture successfully exploits the nature of the Australian landscape which is often known for her harsh and unpredictable character, yet in decayed and burnt materials you have found beauty and enhanced this. Australian artist, Louise Weaver said ‘creating art is how you relate to the world’. What is it about the Australian living land that gives your art practice context?

I think to really know life in the Australian bush you have to equally recognise its ever present death and decay. I just collect remnants and tenderly stitch them back to life with natural fibres, lines and colours that re-imagine nature’s own. 

I feel like my practice is an exploration of the dichotomy of belonging and displacement I feel in so many ways. A kick-back against our environmental recklessness and celebration of the radical beauty at our disposal. It’s make or break!

AUSTRALIA Living Land

567 – 569 Victoria Street, Abbotsford VIC 3067.

Opening Saturday 14th March (10 am – 3 pm) through to Thursday 16th April 2020.

Otomys Contemporary is open by appointment only.

Catalogue request / schedule an appointment via info@otomys.com.

In a recent voyage to the terrain of his childhood, Lucena, Brazil – Eduardo Santos traveled through temporal and geographical distance to a land of isolation and memory.

Earlier photographic work by Eduardo Santos fused colour into movement. However, in the works inspired by Lucena, the artist draws on a mineral realm, bleached by the sun. In this new series, works that were once bolstered by the magnetic gravity and velocity of the earth’s horizon seem to now float and ascend. In starkly minimal compositions, the patterns of fishing nets intersect with the trails left by the tug of the tide. Minute traces expand into vast topographies. The intricate stands for the monumental.

Ethereal and sensitive to every tiny remnant and texture, these photographs are inspired by reverence for an obscure and secluded coastal landscape. A homage to both the motherland and the mother. Here, on pearlescent beaches, the pale reach of the sky fuses with the sand and the ocean meets in an ellipse. In this unknown place, the horizon has the power to fold in upon itself, inverting the waves into the clouds. And on the skin of the sand, humans and creatures leave their trails – raking delicate pathways on the sand.

Schedule a time to view Eduardo Santos’ collection.

Browse Eduardo Santos’ online catalogue.

Anna van der Ploeg is a contemporary artist based in Cape Town, South Africa. Her interdisciplinary practice is comprised of printmaking, painting and sculpture. The success of two solo shows in Cape Town and artist in residence programs in France, India and Japan have been formative to her process based practice and furthered her appreciation for different methods in print. Van der Ploeg is interested in exploring proximity to discomfort and what we choose to reveal of ourselves. Using diverse materials – paper, wood, ink, metal, rust, wax – she approaches these questions from multiple angles. Van der Ploeg’s parallel role as a beekeeper permeates her visual language; the rich, ritualistic performance allows her to embody this veiled figure and mine it’s metaphors.

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Schedule a time to view Anna van der Ploeg’s collection within the Melbourne gallery.

You have spent significant time between France, India and Japan – How have each of these countries informed your practice? 

The residency in Japan was also a training in Mokuhanga watercolour woodblock printmaking. This appealed to me for combining two things I love: print and wood. Since then I have included the blocks themselves into my practice. Woodblocks are a willful, anachronistic affectation in a world that has largely dispensed with ancient forms of print; the ubiquity of digital printers has made them obsolete. The use of colour and appreciation for subtlety in Japan had some influence on me. And then just being in a place of such paradox and confusing contradictions was incredibly stimulating. In India I worked in very simple media – ink on paper – and in a very hermetic setting. I think it opened a more personal dialogue in my work than I’d made myself available to previously. My days were glaringly punctuated by meals, and it lead to thinking about mealtime more generally, and how it is spent and shared. France fine tuned my lithography skills, affirming that this inaccessible medium is as unique as I suspected.

Having traveled extensively, you continue to return to Cape Town. What makes this city the place that you call home?

What indeed? This goddamn relentless wind blew me away with the NikNaks packets and then sucked me and my little green passport back. A friend moved to Joburg and said ‘you know, everyone in Cape Town goes on about the mountain and the sea, but, you know, I never used them!’ However, I’m here on the mountain and I miss it when I’m gone. Returning made me realise that I am, for better and worse, a Cape Town girl, a cliché I am content with. How this estranged city identifies with the rest of the country is something more complicated. The political climate, emerging voices and thoughts contain some sort of urgency. It is a space that I can’t idealise or always understand, and so it draws me in.

The titles of your paintings really speak to us. In an era where ‘Untitled’ is commonly used to reference an artwork, how do you determine the titles of your work? And how important do you find the relationship between the title and the work itself?

Reading and writing is a central part of my process. I start with writing down thoughts, links, worded illustrations, or notes from something I’m reading.  I can’t help a little cheesy wordplay, taking an opening to associate one thing to another with combining their words. It seems like a lost opportunity not to. I like the notion of the role of art to address the unspeakable, but that that work still has a title. To different extents, titles are footnotes, guides, or steal the show completely. Titles are important. In one account in Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl prayer, someone says: ‘we think language, but language also thinks us’. I admire people who manage to tailor language to their own needs, to use it in a way that is entirely their own.

You have a parallel role as a beekeeper. Can you share some insight into your time shared with this extraordinary species? 

Beekeeping is such a rich practice. I took it up after two things happened synchronously. Firstly, I was walking in a hiking group and we were attacked by a swarm of bees. One man was stung more than 30 times. Everyone was stung, except me!

Then I read J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999), in which an observer figure, removed from being human or animal, is alluded to. This text explores the sympathies between all species.

After that it seemed obvious that I need to keep bees! The hierarchies in the beehive and a hive’s ties to the keeper are a synecdoche for our own social structures, allowing me to probe the experience of our proximity to one another, the discomfort we sometimes find there, and what we then choose to reveal about ourselves. Beekeeping became quasi-performative, allowing me to step into anonymity, out of the hyper-visibility of being white and female in post-Apartheid South Africa. This distance provided space to interrogate the pre-accepted cast of the play in which I am an actor  – space in the shifting self-perception of young adulthood, and in making art that represents others.

I wanted to understand the relationship of a figure of power to a micro-organism; of myself to this world within a box, but it turned out I only cracked open the lid. The practice of beekeeping proved to be dense with symbolism located in diverse histories and mythologies. It is physical thinking, methodical and responsive engagement, away from the studio and making art. My fear, clumsiness, laziness has been felt in the way the bees react to me. For all the control, it is also totally unpredictable.

After the success of your last solo show Growing To Another Sun at Smith Studio, Cape Town. What have you been working on and towards?

I’ve spent a lot of time working on applications for Master of Fine Arts programs abroad; going through the motions of interviews and funding applications. Much of the application process requires reflection on your previous work. It took longer than I expected, but the time made room for research, learning and really thinking about where I want to be in the next couple of years, how I want my work to grow and what I want to communicate.