" ... I think I am justified in characterising the four elements as the hormones of the imagination"Gaston Bachelard
There is a strong current running through the work of a number of Australian women artists that is best captured by the notion of the 'elemental'. The list of artists might include: Robyn Backen, Joan Grounds, Joan Brassil, Joyce Hinterding, Judy Watson, Anne Graham, Jennifer Turpin, and Janet Laurence. The notion of the elements or the elemental, in turn, runs through the work of a number of philosophers who can be described as part of the French Phenomenological tradition: Gaston Bachelard, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, and Luce Irigaray. In this article, I want to examine the work of just one of these artists, Robyn Backen, in the light of these 'philosophical elements'.
What I am calling an 'elemental' current has been identified by other writers as a concern with nature, natural processes, the physical world, site, context, environment, matter, substance, and so forth .2 I have chosen the term 'elemental' to describe this current, rather than these other synonyms, because not only does elemental comprehend all of these meanings, it also suggests a non-appropriative attitude to nature and substance and, most importantly, an involution or folding back of elemental substance into the way we think about the human. These two additional understandings of elemental, from Levinas and Merleau-Ponty respectively, are crucial to an appreciation of the critical power of this kind of work.
The subtle form this criticality takes has been identified already by Stephanie Radock: she refers to the work of
Australian women sculptors as "demonstrating different ways of looking at things, re-imagining and re-inventing".3 Such a revisioning... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline