Marvellous Monstrosities
Dave Eggleton
2008
Untitled, driftwood sculpture, 1988 (Photograph by Jeff Busby)
Karen Lovegrove Gallery,
Melbourne solo exhibition, 1993
(Photograph by Mark Ashkanasy)
Tony Oliver Gallery,
Melbourne solo exhibition, 1990 (Photography by Jeff Busby)
The Sculptures of Nicole Page-Smith
Karen Lovegrove Gallery,
Melbourne solo exhibition, 1993
Private Collection and Collection Monash University Museum of Art
(Photography by Mark Ashkanasy)
Explorations of mass and form, they mutate constantly, always on the move in a search for pattern, sequence, equilibrium. A piece at rest is a piece completed; yet it is also inevitably gestating another piece, one that will assume a new shape. Pushing the envelope of shape for two decades now, Page-Smith’s sculptural dexterity has created successive generations of bodies with an astonishing fecundity. They represent a life-journey: this is a sculptor groping her way forward via her surrogates, which are themselves about sensations of growth, budding and transformation. They aim to suggest that consciousness itself is an organic, flowing and altering force.
Sculpture, then, can still stake out ground as a vital philosophical and formalist art, one able to give contour to strange attractors-the deep patterns-of chaos theory, and thus impose the idea of underlying order.
Nicole Page-Smith’s work is steeped in sculptural tradition as in a precious elixir, one which makes her work sparkle and reverberate to echoes of art history at every twist and turn. After graduating from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 1988, she began exhibiting pieces made out of scrap wood salvaged from under bridges, from waste ground, and from industrial and agricultural lots. This weathered timber was shaped and nailed up into assemblages-open-ended chutes and sluices-that encourage you to look through them and around them as they playfully trap space and set it free. Set on spindly legs and often featuring a headboard, the pieces resemble doggy creatures; they are witty arrangements that have a kind of tail-wagging exuberance, a bounding energy in a way they bind volume, in their terrier-like tenacity of purpose.
Melbourne studio installation, 1999
(Photography by Andrew Curtis)
Untitled, glass and limestone, 1991
Collection Monash University Museum of Art
(Photograph by Mark Ashkanasy)
Untitled, painted wood model, 1991 (Photograph by Jeff Busby)
Untitled, hessian, wax and steel mesh, 1999 (Photography by Andrew Curtis)
Previously published in Art New Zealand magazine, Number 126 – Autumn, 2008, pg. 46-49.
Nicole Page-Smith’s sculpture takes as its archetype the body-in all its organic variety-and then proceeds to body forth the world. Hers is an articulation of mammal limbs and insect wings, of spider’s silk and birds’ nests, crenellation of bone and petals of ears. Her serried groups-the sets and sub-sets-issue from her head like thought bubbles that have trapped and given expression as solid matter by her hands.
They are exercises in sharply delineated construction-each cleaned-up scrap of timber neatly pulls its weight-but they don’t come off as art class projects, rather their pared-down minimalism implies a frugal inventive approach, an innate purist sensibility.
These freestanding and untitled works of 1989 were succeeded by the wall reliefs of 1990, also untitled: square, oblong or rectangular plaques using simple materials-such as charcoal, wood, wax and cloth. By 1991 this series also included sheets of glass. On one level they are clever homages to Postminimalism, to Arte Povera, and to the sculptors Eva Hesse and Joseph Beuys, while on another level they are votive, doctrinal altars to ‘Art’ and fetish-like art-worship, but on a third-and-more significant-level they are about the struggle of an artist in search of self-recognition. They are like a series of symbolic mirrors, mirrors which absorb light and deny reflection; instead they are mirrors which conjure up rejection and Lacanian paradoxes of the self.
Where others might have been content to stop and fiddle around with such paradoxes, Nicole Page-Smith kept pushing forward. In 1992 she produced a series of free-standing, tall glass boxes. These shafts of glass evoke skyscrapers and termite mounds, but they also chic totem poles, and one of the semi-deities they invoke is the American painter Barnett Newman. Celebrated for his minimalist canvases divided by a vertical stripe or ‘zip’, Newman has proved as astonishing useful landmark for Page-Smith. Her next step was to take the stripe out of the box, turn it into a ribbon and set it dancing: the hard-edged stripe was transformed into a sinuous line.
These ribbon ‘figures’, constructed from black pigment and wax on cloth over wire, were fixed to wall and floor plaques and stood vertically. Thus affixed, the ribbon described an arabesque, spiral or similar shape; they were a series of movements isolated and pinned up for further study: they articulated space.
Drawing in air, they were complemented by drawing on paper, made as rough gestural strokes of black ink. These ink drawings look like a whirl of lines overcoming physical resistance: whirligigs, maelstroms, hatchings born out of vigorous scratching and scoring- the aggressive mark-making serving to embody an elemental burst of energy.
Nicole Page-Smith had been reading John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost around this time, and this literary experience served to inspire the creation of a series of devils or goblins: dark saturnine grotesques in wax and wire who recline in armchairs ‘contemplating evil’ or else, on giant feet, are fleeing from ‘paradise lost’. The sardonic humour of these pieces resurfaced in a continuation of the white plaster forms; a collection of ‘animal gods’ (2003). Using imagery derived from a variety of sources-temple effigies produced by archaic pantheistic cults, adventure comic books, children’s toys, a pet cat, a French movie-Page-Smith elicits a polymorphous menagerie featuring a jackal-headed Anubis-who is one foxy beast-as well as a very thin donkey with wings, a long-eared centaur, and so on. These gangling creatures seem almost cuddly, certainly no longer monstrous; rather, they tease at the origins of sculpture as objects of veneration.
Awe has vanished, these are former gods translated into clowns and dolls and registering the numb, media-saturated ‘whatever’ of the present-day. They have been coaxed forth-fragmentary beings-by a teasing creator, able to whirl them, so to speak, around her little finger in a virtuoso display of morphogenetic power.
Choreographing the visceral, building on what has gone before, Nicole Page-Smith, in 2004, moved on to smoother effigy-type sculptures. Whereas before bases had been feet and hooves as ill-defined plinths, now they became delicate tips and oval paddles: pod-like stabilizers offering a satisfying sense of balance. The cartoon shapes, too, had become more resonant, less didactic: biomorphic entities suggesting a child lost, gazing off awkwardly, or else a senior citizen burdened with too much melting flesh.
Other shapes, poised like precious relics, suggest spoons, brooches, spectacles: the shape of the matter, arousing questions, speculations. More and more, the white plaster forms, expertly balanced and uniquely shaped, seem to evoke the psychological pressure of personalities: the sculpture turning to story-telling.
In the forcing house of Nicole Page-Smith’s imagination there seem to be endless forms. In late 2004, the forcing house became a hothouse for the orchidaceous: dangling, epiphytes, ripe gourds, scribbly growths, arachnoid forms. Hung wires or nylon, these doodle-bugs are suspended, twisty, tortuous, seeking to trace out a path for themselves. Thus, constructed from painted canvas, polyester wadding and steel rods, they articulate and enfold space.
The steel rod is the sinuous line: the spine, the prong, the barb, the mandible, the flailing tentacle. Around it cluster blobby bits: a thorax, an abdomen, a uterus-name your body part. This is the organic as primal imagery, sourced to a matrix. While some steel rod armatures descend as aerial roots; others rise up as vestigial fingers.
More recently (between 2005 and 2007) the sculptor has added beeswax as a material, and increased the use of bright colours as mood enhancers. In the end, Nicole Page-Smith, facing off against the great pantheon of the past, has chosen to go inwards, as into a lair, and emerged with her own singular pantheon of marvellous monstrosities: sylphs and caryatids, angels and devils, chandeliers of antlers, candelabras of questing tendrils.
By now-1995-Page-Smith’s sculptural forms had become unpinned from their plaques and plinths and began to slither down onto the floor; had begun to hug corners or flatten themselves directly onto the wall. Incorporating plaster-saturated cloth over wire-mesh these bulked-up, fibrous objects resembled scarves and blankets, girdles and wrappings. They developed vents and vanes and even tentative wings: flaps tentatively extended. They seemed about to stir into life.
Another shuffle, and-hey presto!-these floor sculptures had evolved into shrouded human shapes in hunched foetal postures. Moulded from chain-mesh hidden inside raw jute sacking wraparounds, in turn caked with cement, these mournful tatterdemalions, looking more than slightly repellant, began to multiply into a theatre of untouchables, a bazar of beggars emerged from some outer penumbra, some underground catacomb.
In fabricating such peek-a-boo puppets with their whispering rags, their rough bandages, Page-Smith triumphs conclusively over her artistic crisis of identity, her anxieties of influence. This is an extraordinary parade of psychic wreckage. The sculptor went on refining its assembly for more than five years, making metaphor out of material-wrangles of wire, clods of concrete, bales of sacking-by wrapping and unwrapping, by knotting and reknotting, by bundling and unbundling; her entrapping process intrinsically emblematic of the pathos, the beauty and horror of the human condition.
These trapped and sacked bodies endure as sunken husks, and, having eviscerated and mummified them, Page-Smith proves that they are also cocoons for a surprising metamorphosis: her white plaster series, stage one of which was begun in 2000 and completed in 2003. This series starts with the shapes of snares, pelvic girdles and embryos, before continuing for a while as a morphing, as a shape-shifting, whose sources are as ancient as the Nile yet as relevant as tomorrow’s rainclouds. The creamy whiteness of the plaster, meanwhile, evokes everything from candlewax to marble, by way of soapsuds and bone tissue and whipped cream and mashed potato and aerosol foam and, ultimately, cumulus cloud-that final, vaporous, airborne form-finder.
As always, the human body is the ghost at the Page-Smith’s feast of nebulous imagery: her plaster-coated offerings are embryonic malformations with no discernable centre, or at least not at first. Amphibian, mammalian, reptilian, avian: this totem ancestry, at once atavistic and amorphous, veering ambiguously between the melancholic and the ecstatic. Page-Smith is still making that ribboning line dance, but it has bloated up, distended and given birth to other lines which twist, buckle, probe the air.
The year Page-Smith began this series-2000-she also shifted countries, moving with the artist Jeffrey Harris from Melbourne to live in Dunedin. The results of this move are not apparent until the following year when in a separate set of works she started in on blocks of Oamaru limestone. Whereas previously she had been an assembler and modeler rather than a carver, now she chiselled at the stone’s surface as if to test the material’s integrity, before hacking out-as if from a megalith-a lingam: a two-piece phallic shape held together by a concealed steel rod. Staying elemental, she then hacked a void right though a stone block: a hollowing out that referred back to earlier spatial enclosures made of wood. The title of Passage After the Fall (2002), helps suggest that it is a time tunnel, an archaic means of egress from a mythical or Biblical realm.
To chip stone and leave the gouge marks as evidence is to present time as texture. In Untitled (Homage to Painting) (2002) Page-Smith does just this, then cuts a narrow defile in the stone with a power saw, as if carving out a linear niche which might stand in and do duty for Barnett Newnan’s stripe: here, absence is confirmed as presence; dug out of stone, the line lives.