Anna Taylor - 'Alluvial'

Wednesday 19 March - Sunday 6 April 2014

Alluvial continues and extends many years of exploration of aerial landscape, its features across deep time and our relationship to these elements.

The works are abstract and symbolic rather than direct depictions of topography. We sense an aerial perspective, feel that we are looking down through the atmosphere to a vast stretch of terrain, but at the same time intricate pattern work draws us in to a contemplation of the myriad echoes between the macroscopic and microscopic view. The works echo one another unmistakably. 

In departing from the conventions of pictorial representation and intentional brushwork, a new receptivity also entered the working process; an invitation to the random flows of thin paint and substances. Taylor evolved a technique of flooding the surface and waiting for it to dry, and then following the intricacies of the edge of the stain, laying bare the simple beauty of the way liquid flows, resists and settles. The canvases appear to be sections lifted from something much larger rather than views complete in themselves. One flows into the next with a poignant quality of gentleness that might suggest to us a lighter touch in our contemporary relationship to the natural world. The tracings ….. bring to our awareness the way the land both embodies and evokes memory. (1)

The current paintings continue the focus on beauty of the landscape and contained within the sense of endless time preceding and following the moments in which the images are captured on canvas. Many of these latest works depict the ebb and flow of water into the mud flats of Broome, the gradual and inevitable layering of sediment, sand, earth and foliage across vast time.

However, beneath the surface of other works is another layer, a sense of deep foreboding. Now these paintings contain the ominous sense that time is shortening for these sacred places, as politicians, mining interests and developers seek to exploit them for short term gain. Within the immeasurable preceding millennia we are merely a nano second, yet these places could be gone for all time to follow.
1. Sarah Tomasetti Earthscape - Anna Taylor November 2012

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