Ker­rie Poliness
Non-Objec­tive Wildflowers

Non-Objec­tive Wild­flow­ers at Anna Schwartz Gallery cel­e­brates Ker­rie Poli­ness’ inves­ti­ga­tions into the for­mal sym­me­tries of par­al­lel­o­gram geome­tries, seri­al­i­ty and rep­e­ti­tion. As the title sug­gests, this new body of work con­veys both the phys­i­cal and meta­phys­i­cal rem­nants of native wild­flow­ers scat­tered across the Vic­to­ri­an Vol­canic Plains, and the kalei­do­scop­ic res­o­nance of their presence. 

Poli­ness retraces the loss and mem­o­ry of this wild veg­e­ta­tion, which is threat­ened with extinc­tion, through trans­lat­ing the ener­getic colour fields as a net­work of inter­con­nect­ed struc­tures, into an opti­cal cadence and per­cep­tu­al dif­frac­tion. As the artist explains: “ Like the Sun­shine Diuris, an orchid once known as the ​‘snow in the pad­dock’, the colour worlds of these tiny flow­ers and plants have a par­tic­u­lar res­o­nance and ener­gy in the world that con­tin­ue to be lost. These paint­ings though, are non-objec­tive, not rep­re­sen­ta­tions of indi­vid­ual plants or flow­ers, rather an attempt to recall their visu­al magic.

Pre­sent­ed as indi­vid­ual works, the over­all com­po­si­tion ges­tures one sin­gu­lar form or line that folds and reforms–bend­ing into a ​‘geo­met­ric wave’, and form­ing into a spa­tial elas­tic­i­ty or cor­po­re­al archi­tec­ture, span­ning the entire gallery space. Cen­tral to her pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with the dia­mond motif as well as the struc­tur­al grid; in these works we expe­ri­ence Poli­ness’ chro­mat­ic lan­guage as a semi­otic sys­tem and as frag­ment­ed tem­po­ral­i­ties. The artist’s abil­i­ty to cap­ture and for­mal­ize the trans­fer­ence of ener­gy from these wild­flow­ers results in an expan­sive geom­e­try that shifts from sub­tle to vibrant hues. Exe­cut­ed through a process of sub­trac­tion and mul­ti­pli­ca­tion, each line acts as an instru­ment to either reveal or con­ceal an inter­nal rhyth­mic logic.

A promi­nent fig­ure in the Aus­tralian art world since the 1980s, Poli­ness is known for her large-scale wall draw­ings, often craft­ed by unknown col­lab­o­ra­tors from the artist’s instruc­tion man­u­als and site-spe­cif­ic instal­la­tions, as well as from her con­tri­bu­tions to the 1990s revival of abstract art in Mel­bourne. Along­side fel­low artist Gary Wil­son, Poli­ness launched Store 5, an artist run space focused on new exper­i­men­ta­tions which inter­ro­gat­ed the tra­di­tion­al dis­cours­es of 20^th Cen­tu­ry geo­met­ric abstrac­tion and invit­ed mem­bers to explore makeshift mate­ri­als and ​‘do-it-your­self’ processes. 

Aes­thet­i­cal­ly aligned to the dis­cours­es of 1960s Con­cep­tu­al Art, Op Art and Geo­met­ric Abstrac­tion with artists such as Sol LeWitt, Brid­get Riley and Piet Mon­dri­an, Poli­ness’ exam­i­na­tions are informed by per­cep­tions of the mate­r­i­al world and find­ing ways of expe­ri­enc­ing and mak­ing vis­i­ble the unseen. As she explains: ​“It’s about the phys­i­cal­i­ty and the mate­ri­al­i­ty of the world around us, rather than of some sort of mate­r­i­al per­fec­tion which I see as an illu­sion, often rep­re­sent­ing a high­er being. I’m inter­est­ed in the mate­r­i­al world and how we relate to that.” 

This enquiry can be traced back to Poli­ness’ ear­ly inves­ti­ga­tions in the 1990s, when she began observ­ing the sub­tle dif­fer­ences and irreg­u­lar­i­ties of pat­terns found in gum leaves com­pared to tins of baked beans. She observed that whether nat­ur­al or mass-pro­duced, all objects or things are unique and dis­tinct to each oth­er. ​“All objects that are mass pro­duced and made to look iden­ti­cal to each oth­er, Poli­ness explains, are actu­al­ly all dif­fer­ent. Look at the atoms, the mol­e­c­u­lar struc­ture, the mate­ri­al­i­ty of every­thing; every­thing is dif­fer­ent. This aspect of mate­ri­al­i­ty con­nects every object in the world, human-made or otherwise.”

In Poli­ness’ Non-Objec­tive Wild­flow­ers, view­ers expe­ri­ence the sound of a land­scape, a con­cep­tu­al sym­pho­ny staged by a sem­blance of inter­lac­ing lines. And despite its visu­al sim­plic­i­ty, this new body of work illu­mi­nates the order in nature as an intel­li­gent struc­ture reflect­ing the com­plex­i­ties between har­mo­ny and dis­so­nance. As Poli­ness rein­forces, ​“Through geom­e­try, it’s kind of like a short­cut to think­ing about things that are quite complex.”

Ker­rie Poli­ness Non-Objec­tive Wild­flow­ers, Anna Schwartz Gallery, 27 July – 7 Sep­tem­ber 2024.