Image: Sydney artist Gabriella Hirst with some of her work.

Cross-posted from the Something Else 89.7fm blog.

This post is a response to an interview with Gabriella Hirst, a young Sydney artist who has an upcoming group show at ESP Gallery. The podcast of this interview (see below) also features Something Else contributors Kath Lim and Lauren Carroll Harris.

Gabriella started off as a painter and ended up moving further and further away from the walls. Her recent works involves layers of silk with images of bone, flowers and faces appearing through one another, evoking ghosts, savagery, gentility and anatomical drawings, drawing from her research into 18th Century feral child Marie-Angelique Memmie LeBlanc. Displayed in heavy wooden boxes that both separate and unify the images into one, the visual ambiguity of the pieces are impossible to resolve.

You can find Gabriella’s website here: http://gabriellahirst.com/

My own interests have recently been in the bed of poetics (perhaps more specifically, an ontological poetics), which involves a lot of fumbling and confusion at times with moments of clear brain-fucked clarity. Poetics deals with the being of language, of man as a creature that dwells in language, with the proposition that there is nothing before language and that it is always possible (but never there) to find your way back to the origin. A way to make the world. If man is a technological creature, the way he can speak is important. Language is the technology that makes us.

But who will listen these days, even if a modern Prometheus of words was to arise, offering some new world to be dwelled in?

Perhaps poetics is too undetermined. It seems to be anything at all sometimes. I haven’t the slightest idea what it is and yet I seem to write about it constantly both for uni (quite successfully) and for myself (much less so).

Poetics, you are sadly obscure when dwelled in words no one understands.

Which is why the bristles on the back of my neck (a good indicator of danger or mad beauty) prick up when something so immediate as a painting seems to be doing something very poetical. Here I must make the point I have been trying to make in a roundabout way in the previous paragraphs – I am not an art critic, theorist, scholar nor thinker but I will talk about art in this instance because it has interested me.

Hirst’s recent work, particular her gouache on silk works, layered upon one another, work with history, savagery and wild beauty. They are impossibly photographic in that the detail of the images is precise, factual, and yet they also look like things that no camera could ever have captured, like sepia x-rays from a once-off steampunk invention designed to look into a person’s soul and then quickly destroyed after for the chaotic intimacy it revealed.