Working with olive oil, pure pigment, oil paint and china clay, Skye Jamieson’s paintings are moulded and shaped to reveal immediate impressions of her environment. Each of four diptychs is a psychogeographic exploration ‘documenting’ Canberra’s cityscape as she drifts through the streets in a state of acute awareness. Jamieson’s approach can be linked with the Situationists’ (1957-1972) idea of dissolving the boundaries between life and art, and her every work is a journey of discovery in which she exchanged distance for depth. As is the case with many forms of abstraction, the ways that Jamieson’s paintings connect with audiences depends on her ability to communicate feelings and to present views of the city that are not pictorial but emotional. These minimal pieces, the result of much experimentation with unfamiliar materials, are a slow burn as Jamieson eschews drama for the quiet intensity that has characterised her work to date. In their succinct subtlety she distracts an audience overwhelmed by the glamour of consumerism, (such as television and computer games) ultimately providing welcome relief from the pace and pressures of everyday life. Jamieson’s new work proposes inventive strategies for exploring the city, or any other inhabited space, by straying from predictable paths and inspiring awareness of intuition as a catalyst for cognisance.
Jamieson’s unique brand of abstraction with patches of blue also owes a little (less than usual) to Yves Klein and the Nouveau Realism movement (1960s), noted for finding new ways of presenting and perceiving reality. The approach of both the New Realists and the Situationists connects directly with the discovery of familiar things we encounter in the streets, but don’t necessarily notice. The challenge for artists such as Jamieson therefore, is to find innovative ways of seeing the ordinary. Thus the fluidity achieved through her ostensibly free-form manipulation of china clay juxtaposed with the adjacent blues, mimics the flow of water, a recurrent presence in Jamieson’s work. Acutely aware of her physical relationship with water through, for instance, puddles, drains, dew and sprinklers, she strips her environment to reveal observations of presence and a sense, positive and negative, in worlds where natural and artificial converge. The properties of flowing water might also stand as a metaphor for the ways that Jamieson and her audience come together, in an essentially tranquil place, free of modernity’s ambient noise, where the artwork flows over and immerses the viewer in a state of quiet disquiet.
David Broker, Canberra Contemporary Art Space
