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Harvest
Collaboration with Aleks Danko
Painting, Works on Paper
A bird's eye view of Allan and Danko's exhibition might have shown a plain, the site of a gentle opera, a pantomime even, where two philosophies tell each other divergent never-ending stories, while providing a single muted spectacle.
Linda Walker
Reaping the Harvest, Broad Sheet, September 1990
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HARVEST
Before us was a gleaming field of corn, harvesters in full bore, and people celebrating from camps on the edge of the field. The tone of life was slower then. Sometimes it felt as if the very rhythm of the soil, sand and grit was eaten into our bones, and the rhythm of nature spoke through us as much as we spoke through it.
Untroubled by the demands of the avantgarde, of speakings, crowded rooms and galleries, and attempts to bring things to a pinnacle, some other motion spoke through us in this time out of time. In this time when the ryhthm of life was foretold by the seasons themselves. When we felt ourselves to be more fully a part of life, the life that lashes in with the beating waves on the shore line, that lacerates and moves with the air currents above the sea.
We knew then too much of our longing was nostalgia. We knew then the sound of salt upon the waves, beach, break, beat. We knew then the tempest in the soul as part of the begetting and the passing away. We imagined a rhythm unforetold by the salty saplings on the shore line. Some power different from that of man, nature and woman, and wondering, of goose bumps and a thousand other things of more or less significant note; that were noting themselves out and through and over the tempest in the mind.
Then that was saturday and now we move through to tuesday and all the time we are searching without knowing that that is what we are searching for. We are searching without knowing that the manner of the searching is taking us in wave steps, over the sea and back again, to a place where we can get our feet back on the ground. When the gallery is no longer an isolated shorling on a darkling sea and we can know once again how it might sparkle as a meeting for some sort of community, and not be divided from within and without by warring factions.
Christina Davidson and Carolyn Barnes
Harvest, collaborative catalogue essay
Watters Gallery, Sydney and Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, Adelaide, 1990
FURTHER READING
Linda Walker
Reaping the Harvest
Broad Sheet, Vol. 19, No. 3, September 1990