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At the heart of Judith Wright's exhibition One Dances is a palpable sense of loss. As Suhanya Raffel explains in her catalogue essay, the loss of a child thirty years ago, and the recent locating of the gravesite, have inspired Wright to produce this body of work which incorporates a video, a series of drawings, an artist's book and several photographs. The play between mediums highlights aspects of each- the video work becomes a study in light and shade, while the abstract drawings spark with figurative allusions. Linking it all together are the acts of a body in motion, captured on video, painting onto paper, turning the pages of a book. Wright's work consistently evokes the body, both present and absent, and here the absence is deeply personal, a quiet lament for time passing and life lost.
In the front gallery space, five drawings were installed around the room, featuring abstracted forms painted in white, black and deep brown on Wright's signature waxed Japanese paper, each surface crinkled and veined like skin. Abstracted from elements featured in the video component, the forms loom ominously from one side of the frame to the other, some overlapping, others crisp and clear. In contrast to the soft, ethereal white-onwhiteness of Wright's recent drawing series Blind of Sight (2001) and Flight (2002), these works are occupied with inky shadows, with hard, sharp delineations, creating high-contrast figure/ground relationships. At times the shapes recall the work of Abstract Expressionists such as Morris Louis or Franz Kline, compounded by their large scale, yet Wright's forms are always tightly controlled, their textures layered and worked back, their outlines deliberate.
The starkness of these works is emphasized by their... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline