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Tidal Drift 2010,
paintings
Liquidity
For me the process of painting is one in which order and disorder are continually touching and changing each other. Words I think of are: beauty, dialogue, challenge, rest: dialogue with incessantly changing possibilities, challenge in stepping into a void then having to choose, beauty in riding a wave when it does come, the feeling of rest when something 'just right' has miraculously appeared. Relentlessly ploughing through uncertainty and fear to catch the feeling of flow. Swimming in the 'inner weather' of deep sea and far space. Dragging something previously unknown out of this sea as a fragment of understanding of the world I hope to share..
Micky Allan
Exhibition Catalogue, Painthing (as one), Australian Experimantal Art Foundation, Adelaide, 2010
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Painthing (as one)
Painting. Painting, pain thing: painthing. Maybe this has happened to you too; you're driving along a suburban street or you're reading the label on the back of a tin of crushed tomatoes somewhere in a dim corner of a supermarket and suddenly a word, actually any word but this time it's this word, gets caught on the sieve-like structure that divides your perception of ordinary action from an extraordinary something. Immediately the word as-it-is jumps but at you and you see it in its entire absurdity, its un-meaning, its limp body superimposed on the frenetic buzziness of the universal attraction and repulsion going on all around you. Then you begin to examine it, prod it for signs of its former life. Nothing. Something very surprising suddenly happens; its body becomes slowly absorbed into the pureness of action and reaction, memory and meaning, membrane and pulsing core. It continues to offer itself to this whole until the shape you once knew emerges elsewhere as another; different, but:, somehow the same. And then you try and understand (what else can you do, you're stuck in a long check-out queue) how this word—this painful thing actually—can simultaneously be both itself and other. You look around; people are still in the queue, shelves still stacked, fluoros still buzzing, cars still silently gliding by outside, tired smiles still being offered. And then you realize that almost everything (you think almost because somehow you feel it cannot be quite this absolute) is both itself and some other thing; inalienably itself, yet distantly other. Is a constellation like that? Are the celestial bodies and dust particles that form it simply an infinite collection of collections of otherness, each component offering a kaleidoscopic fragment of the whole, yet each simultaneously desiring both breathless proximity and vast expansive space in which to, utterly and defiantly, be that one thing it feels itself to be? And, what of breathless proximity? Ah, that, the as one-ness thing. I can't speak of that. It's not in my nature, I resolutely surmise, as I get to the check-out just in time.
Domenico de Clario, AEAF Director
Exhibition Catalogue, Painthing (as one), Australian Experimantal Art Foundation, Adelaide, 2010