Big Rock Candy Mountain | Contemporary Art Centre of SA: Project Space | 27th May – 8th JulyIn borrowing its title from Harry McClintock’s 1928 ode to an imagined hobo’s paradise, Amy Joy Watson’s most recent body of work invokes all manner of earthly utopias, from the Land of Cockaigne to the Garden of Eden. Examining the human propensity for imagining different and better worlds from a highly personal and idiosyncratic point of view, Watson’s landscapes outstrip the titular mountain in lavishness and magnificence. The experience of being in one place whilst thinking or dreaming about another could be seen as the fundamental motivator for Watson’s work. Well-worn idioms about the relative greenness of grass spring to mind and this piece of homespun wisdom seems reflected in the development of the artist’s work. While her undergraduate work (undertaken in sunny Adelaide) conjured alpine settings and pioneering treks through winter landscapes, her recent Berlin residency saw her turn her attentions to exotic and carnivalesque tropical locales. This apparent sense of dissatisfaction with one’s surrounds may be burdensome for the artist, but seems to be a key impetus for Watson’s prolific output. While the aforementioned works had their origins in more recognisable terrestrial landscapes, the objects and environments that make up Big Rock Candy Mountain are far more singular and eccentric. It would seem that Watson is well and truly off the edge of the map and here, as they say, there be monsters. From the mutant clam with a giant gobstopper in its heart to the flying machines that are equal parts Jules Verne and Hayao Miyazaki, the work is unapologetically escapist, revelling in a sense of wonder and strangeness. However, like any thoughtfully constructed fantasy world – think Middle- Earth, the Cthulhu Mythos or the Star Wars Expanded Universe – Watson’s work manages to convey a coherence and a sense of verisimilitude despite its wildly eclectic imagery and influences. This peculiar internal logic is in part a result of the artist’s rigorous and highly inventive approach to materials and the making process. Certain formal parameters govern Big Rock Candy Mountain, including the lolly shop colour palette, the recurrent use of spherical armatures and surprising collisions of materials and processes, such as the artist’s peculiar penchant for sewing together balsa wood. There is a lovely wrongness in this unlikely pairing of wood with needle and thread. Not only is it quite possibly the most laborious fixing method imaginable, but the very idea of stitching wood seems to have a poetic or even magical weight, as if the innate properties of the very materials had been transformed. The artist’s approach to the colour and surface of these balsa structures also alludes more to textiles than woodwork. Favouring staining and dyeing the wood with washes of watercolour, Watson elicits from it a silken, satin, fabric-like quality. Curiously enough, it is this very delicacy and sensitivity to materials that allows the artist to flirt with such outré and potentially risky elements as helium, glitter and glow-in-the-dark paint and get away with it. The addition of these delightfully gaudy elements to her material vocabulary points to a new and emerging sensibility in Watson’s work. In conversation, the artist identifies an implied presence within the work: that of a child-like alter ego. While the work clearly speaks to the invented or imagined worlds of childhood, it eschews the makeshift qualities of forts and cubbies in favour of painstakingly constructed objects and environments. However, despite the artist’s labour being palpably present, the works have a curiously unmediated quality, as if they have been directly transcribed from a child’s imagination without having to pass through the prosaic filter of their imperfect making abilities. Without being overly sentimental, one might even suggest a subtle scent of nostalgia about the work, a nostalgia not only for the joys of childhood play but also for a time when the world was more mysterious and not mapped down to the last square inch. Like the intrepid pioneers that populate her earlier works, Watson is on a constant search for uncharted territories. In the absence of any remaining earthly frontiers, she forges her own and while she may be venturing off into a world of her own creation, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the way will be safe. Words by Roy Ananda Untitled, 2011, balsa wood, watercolour, polyester thread, helium balloon, 350 x 80 x 80cm Untitled, 2011, balsa wood, watercolour, polyester thread, 140 x 150 x 130cm Untitled,2011, balsa wood, watercolour, polyester thread, giant gobstopper, 30 x 50 x 40cm Untitled, 2011 balsa wood, watercolour, polyester thread, plaster, 310 x 200 x 210cm Untitled, 2011, balsa wood, watercolour, Indian ink, polyester thread, glow-in-dark pigment, pine, 50 x 52 x 52 cm Untitled, 2011, balsa wood, watercolour, Indian ink, polyester thread, glitter, pine, 45 x 55 x 55 cm Untitled, 2011, acetate, glow-in-the-dark thread, helium balloon, 220 x 40 x 40 cm Big Rock Candy Mountain, 2011, Installation shot
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