Robyn Burgess
Skating on Thin Ice
June 15 – July 2, 2006
Catalogue essay written by Dr Lisa Beaven
Cold. Foot-stamping, mind-numbing cold. Frozen breath. Snow-covered landscapes. The word ‘Siberia’ written in the snow. A blurred photograph of the Russian border taken from the train, snow falling on water. ‘Skating on Thin Ice’ refers both to Burgess’s intense preoccupation with the icy continents of Europe and North America and the risky business of making art. Her artistic practice relies on her deliberate removal from her familiar environment and insertion into a foreign climate. The resulting body of work sifts emotions of isolation and longing through a filter of memory to deliver images that are loaded with feeling and introspection. In previous work the city was the primary means of exploring that isolation, with Burgess on the outside looking in. Now it is a blank field of snow, and the physical act of writing in it. Soft, eerily empty, indistinct landscapes shift under screens of snow and distilled light.
The snow-coated, layered landscapes are echoed in the sprayed, flicked and drizzled surfaces of the paintings, which form curtains of paint, concealing and revealing other layers beneath. Materials and image combine and separate as embedded visual cues surface. It’s a strategy Burgess also employs in the works on paper where shapes and words emerge through a screen of white spray, powdered charcoal and ink.
This exhibition introduces another metaphor for foreignness, the elk. Carrying loaded associations of shrinking wilderness areas and endangered species, the elk is more important to the artist as a geographical marker of immense distance. It is both a foreign and fragile symbol of the natural environment, and much of this fragility is conveyed in Burgess’s paintings and works on paper in the almost calligraphic depiction of the delicate branching and interlocking shape of the antlers. Typically though, Burgess is fascinated by not only the showy architecture of the antlers, but also by their absurdity; grown in a burst of testosterone only to be discarded months later. ‘Elk’ bestows a sober dignity and a slightly ridiculous heroic quality on the stag, while at the same time the framed headshot is reminiscent of a trophy.
With stealth, cunning and infinite care Burgess delivers up the elusive heart of the exhibition; the foreign as a measure of an internal rather than external journey.
Dr Lisa Beaven
Art Historian and lecturer, La Trobe University
