'Do not go gentle' RACHAEL PARSONS

“Art grows from joy and sorrow, but mostly from sorrow. It grows from human lives.” — Edvard Munch

Amy Stapleton’s exhibition Do not go gentle is not an exhibition about death, nor is it an examination of grief. The work has, however, emerged from a time of the artist’s own grieving, and the experience of loss sits somewhere beneath these works, not as their subject, but as part of the conditions of their making. It is present in their intensity and fragility, the amorphous nature of their forms and their sometimes-sombre colour palette.

For Stapleton, this has been a challenging year. The loss of a close friend, personal health issues and the physical and emotional toll of sustained work culminated in burnout, leaving her feeling increasingly disconnected from, and disinterested in, her creative practice. An artist residency at The Corridor Project, just outside Cowra, NSW, provided an opportunity to step away from the demands of everyday life and reconnect with the pleasure and curiosity of making art. In this context, Stapleton gave herself permission to freely experiment, take risks and work intuitively. It was an opportunity to move beyond what was familiar within her practice to date and to discover what else might emerge when she allowed herself to work differently. Within this space of creative freedom, Stapleton’s practice began to shift from a representational depiction of the landscape towards abstraction.

The body of work includes atmospheric, billowing compositions suggestive of skies, cloud forms and water. The works are constructed layer upon layer through a process of mark-making and simultaneous erasure. There is a sense that there is something missing from the work, like frescos where the details have worn away with time and what is left is the remnants of form and colour, backgrounds with no subject. This absence is mysterious and compelling. The works resonate with Cole Imperi’s concept of ‘shadow loss’: the hidden grief we carry for things we love that change, disappear or come to an end. The landscape is still present in these works but more as an influence than subject, a departure point as opposed to an outcome. It takes a level of confidence to move past representation, to trust that colour and marks and space can speak for themselves.

Within the work, there is a dialogue between Stapleton and several key artistic influences. In Running wild & free, there is an evident nod to Monet’s Water Lilies series. Between 1903 and 1908, Monet produced more than 250 paintings of water lilies, progressively developing his style and exploring spatial relationships. As the series developed, the recognisable elements of landscape became increasingly dissolved, with the water’s surface and reflections occupying the entire pictorial field. Like Monet, Stapleton has moved towards layered colour and fluid, indeterminate forms. There is also something of Bonnard in Stapleton’s use of colour, while the freedom and physicality of her mark-making finds resonance with Abstract Expressionist artists such as Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler. Both artists drew on the natural world as a source while resisting straightforward representation. Mitchell spoke of painting not nature itself but “what it leaves with me”, translating the emotional and sensory residue of landscape into energetic, gestural marks. Frankenthaler similarly used colour, scale and fluidity to evoke the expansive qualities of landscape without depicting it directly. Stapleton follows in their footsteps, working towards building her own visual language.

Another new direction to emerge from this body of work is Stapleton’s use of collage. Collage allowed her to draw on her history in graphic design, while also providing a means of finding a new intuitive pleasure in the act of making. Arranging and rearranging fragments, flipping and rotating them, and searching through the seemingly endless possibilities of colour, pattern, texture and form became an absorbing process of building compositions, to find balance and resolution through play and experimentation.

This is where Do not go gentle ultimately finds its energy: in Stapleton’s decision to keep making and to find a way forward through her work. There is an insistence and bravery within this series. Stapleton has confronted her own expectations about her practice and has given herself permission to move beyond them, to trust herself and follow where the work leads. In doing so, she has opened up new creative possibilities within an expanded abstract language.