Eloise Kirk was awarded Shotgun 8. Through the use of erasure, fragmentation and collage Kirk constructed a sequence of symbolic arrangements. The artist’s work is explicitly elemental, offering an aesthetic response to the interval between beauty and disaster, straddling the periphery of the romantic and the surreal. Shotgun 8: Eloise Kirk, dark maria was presented in the CAT Gallery from 28 September - 27 October, 2019. Commissioned texts by Daine Singer and Lucy Bleach accompanied the exhibition.
dark maria
In the 18th century Edmund Burke theorised the sublime as separate to beauty, as an emotional and intellectual response to terror producing “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling”. This was to be found in landscapes of great magnitude and vastness that are both fear and awe-inspiring. Burke also described experiences that would remind the individual of our smallness and irrelevance in beneficial ways, to connect us to something greater than ourselves. This theory carried into the arts, and particularly landscape painting of the 19th century.
Eloise Kirk works predominantly with collage and poured resins, creating works about suspension, erasure and fragmentation. Often these works contain a central rock or geological form, severed from its context and suspended in resin. With dark maria at Contemporary Art Tasmania, Kirk has expanded the scale, concerns and materiality of her work. The resulting exhibition comprises ‘paintings’ (made from collages and poured pigmented resin), together with a series of monumental sculptures formed from pigmented plaster applied to ply supports. These are accompanied by three kinetic works, in which her paintings sit atop rocking motorised bases.
Daine Singer - excerpt
Read full Daine Singer SHOTGUN 8 text
dark maria
In high school our geology teacher would quote Heraclitis in ancient Greek: Φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ, and then translate for us in English: Nature loves to conceal Herself (or, Nature loves to hide). She would answer our questions with questions, which was slightly annoying but I respected the opacity of her stone-walling us, as it enabled her to become the lithic subject she taught.
So we found our agency to anticipate partial geomorphic signs, to think of geology not just as a tectonic cycle of forming and breaking, but as an arcane force that inherently sought to remain something of a mystery. Acquainting us with the secret subterranean realms that exceeded our vision, we came to know deep-focus earthquakes, subduction zones, brittle crusts and liquid earth. Land features that had formed through volcanic eruption, metamorphic folding and metastable states were now visible and compelled attention. She got us thinking about how their mesmerising forms conjured a feeling of the body, a feeling of the feminine, a feeling of the sublime, and how they might be as much located in the physical world around us, as within our own emerging psychological terrain.
Lucy Bleach - excerpt
Read full Lucy Bleach SHOTGUN 8 text
IMAGES: Eloise Kirk, dark maria, 2019. Photos Remi Chauvin.