Essays on Earth. Brodie Ellis, Paul Kane and John Wolseley

Heavy Launch considers the cost of human space travel and the dangers of colonial fantasy at the expense of the earth and all its mysterious beauty. A rocket, fallen back to earth, decomposes into the soil and vegetation while Giant Cuttlefish (Sepia Apama) congregate, their gestures a reverberation through deep time.

Below is a text by the intrepid artist John Wolseley that accompanied the artwork. 

“Sometime in 2019, I was walking down Acland Street and wandered into Linden Gallery.  I went into a darkened room and found my field of vision taken over by a huge screen filled with a quivering pulsating field of ‘what on earth is that’? Was it the surface of a lily pond, or the magnified skins of a toad or even the bubbling lava flowing out of a volcano?  After a time, I could differentiate between one or two rippling forms and equally quivery surrounding fields of what turned out to be feathery seaweed stuff.  And then my eye met with another eye.  Several of these pulsating forms kind of faded in and out of focus and I realised that they were cuttlefish.  Sometime later I met the actual artist and she explained to me that the luminous patterned mosaics on the body of these cuttlefish pass through successive colour changes activated by several mysterious physiological urges.  Sometime for camouflage they merge with sand and rock.  These cuttlefish were engaging in a big love festival; and it was as if the sexual and courtship urges deep within them became visible on their skins. I watched the video run though several times and puzzled about how it was that there seemed a marvellous kind of synergy or elective affinity between the eye of the viewer, the surface of the screen and the energy field of the cuttlefish. 

Was this something to do with the magic of the video medium and the great big screens? Or the way one’s whole field of vision is filled with a single moving plane of movement?   It’s as if the viewer is looking through the curved lens of a giant eye or even turning into one – like the eye in Odilon Redon’s famous lithograph, The Eye Balloon.  As I walked along St Kilda pier and peered into the murky water of the bay, I wondered why looking at Brodies’ video had been so gorgeously revelatory; and how it had made me feel that I had left my human self behind and merged into ‘cuttlefishness’.

  And then I had a vivid memory of another time when I had looked into the eye of a wild creature and had just such a total visceral connection with it.   It was when I was climbing high on a mountain ridge on the Cuillin ranges in Skye.  In a high wind I was moving past a rock face near the top of the mountain.  I looked to my left as the wall of rock ended and right close-up to me resting on the wind was a huge golden eagle.  I was so close that the side of the bird with its rippling feathers completely filled my vision... It slowly turned its head toward me, our eyes met – and then silently slowly it sank into the valley below.”

-John Wolseley, 2021

BRODIE ELLIS

Heavy Launch

7 September > 10 November 2019

Opening night: Friday 6 September, 6-8pm

Heavy Launch presents a large sculptural installation, based on the design of Falcon Heavy, the world’s most powerful operational rocket, created by SpaceX to one day take people to the Moon and Mars. On the SpaceX website, its founder Elon Musk has written, “You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great - and that’s what being a spacefaring civilisation is all about. It’s

about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past. And I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars.” 2

His statement is full of optimism, which contrasts sharply with Ellis’ representation of his rocket. Covered in clay, the vessel is earth-bound, literally encrusted with the matter that it sought to escape. Like a relic, exhumed, a monument to a future that may not be witnessed by anyone. A failed escape has taken place and all that is left is a crumbling shell of the technology envisaged to save us... The natural materials that Ellis has used to manually construct this rocket will deteriorate over the course of the exhibition, which further conveys the frailty of the idea that we can colonise other planets in order to

overcome the problems we have created on Earth. Ellis describes this work as “a ritual disempowering of the commercial image of space travel”.

JULIETTE HANSON, Curator, Linden New Art, September 2019

Brodie Ellis explodes The Crystal World REVIEW

Anna Dunnill is an editor for Art Guide Australia,5 June 2018

The land has been prepared, pre-planted. Visible mounds in careful rows, as though saplings or cornstalks might push their green shoots up through the dirt. Instead, in slow motion, the earth turns liquid, a roiling ocean swell. Individual plumes erupt from each mound, for a moment like a neat row of whale spouts. Then the boundary between land and sky dissolves, and a dust cloud blooms across the screen.

In the next shot, a different quiet piece of land slowly explodes. And again. And again.

Brodie Ellis’s video work, A Crystal World, 2016, cuts together footage of Australian mining explosions, sourced online, into a slow motion sequence. As mesmerising as they are destructive, these rhythmic blooms of explosions are almost silent save for a soundtrack of clicks and rustles, clanks and rumbles, rising and falling throughout the film. The title is borrowed from a JG Ballard book, but it could just as easily be a description of what we see here: the crystallising of dust plumes, hanging in the air like a macro view of frozen water.

There is no context for the land we see erupting. It could be anywhere: any patch of earth razed bare and declared uninhabited, up for exploiting. Any history, knowledge or language once held in the soil is dispersed into the atmosphere, over and over.

The exhibition text draws links between Ellis’s work and both land art and abstract expressionism.

The former gives me pause. While it’s true that the Spiral Jetty, for example, involved a large-scale shifting of natural materials, can this footage of annihilations by mining companies – undoubtedly altering the land forever – possibly reference land art in any spirit other than the blackest irony? Emerging in the 1960s, the land art movement emerged in response to the increased commercialisation of art. At the other end of the scale, open-cut mining feeds the globalised market in which natural resources are stripped to their dollar value.

As for abstraction, this is The Crystal World’s tactic of seduction. We are lulled by the slow cycle of stillness and explosion; earth expanding frame by frame into a cloud, sinking back to stillness, erupting again. The rumble and roar of splitting earth is erased into near-silence. Instead, the soundtrack is lo-fi industrial: distant hands slap out a rhythm on a gallon drum, turn a crank-handle or bicycle chain into gentle whirring. There’s a low hum of electronic noise.

This work is an apt, if chilling, response to the reality of the Anthropocene. In cutting together this legacy of destruction, Ellis produces a cyclical lullaby to a dying world. The earth plumes rise and rise and rise. Hilltops, momentarily still, bloom crystal clusters. Clouds grow upwards like a plantation of giant pines. The whole earth is erupting, slowly, softly, inevitably. Annihilation has never been so gentle, like ink tendrils curling through water.

The Crystal World
Brodie Ellis
MARS Gallery
31 May – 23 June 

Framing Nature

26 November 2017 - 18 March 2018 curated by Simon Lawrie, The Balnaves Curator of Australian Sculpture

Featuring works by Fred Williams, John Constable, Janet Laurence, Hanna Tai, Dorothy Napangardi, Siri Hayes, Gabriella Hirst, Brodie Ellis, Danie Mellor, James Geurts.

Framing Nature
The exhibition Framing Nature presents selected works from McClelland’s historical collection augmented by key loaned works, to explore diverse visual and conceptual approaches to nature. Landscape has often been defined by notions of the picturesque and the sublime, while more recent representations are informed by science, politics and spirituality. In surveying varied conceptions of nature, this exhibition attempts to more fully describe our complex and increasingly precarious relationship to the environment. Framing Nature features works by Fred Williams, John Constable, Janet Laurence, Dorothy Napangardi, Siri Hayes, Gabriella Hirst, Brodie Ellis, Danie Mellor and others.

“The Australian landscape is a site where cultures and histories compete, often subtly over time but also with abrupt violence. In this regard, Danie Mellor’s Natura naturans, Naturata, Natura naturata (the twenty first century) 2015 involves a complex interplay between the landscape’s physical and metaphysical elements. The title refers to philosophical concepts regarding nature’s provenance and properties, contrasting with the Indigenous cosmology and understanding of Country that this landscape also holds. Demonstrating this schism, John Skinner Prout’s View from North Shore, Sydney c1850 depicts an early site where conflict took place, but his serene post-settlement picture belies the brutal historical reality of colonial invasion. Landscape continues to have a prominent role as a symbol of nature’s fluctuation, its cycles of destruction, renewal and transmutation. Indigenous paintings, such as Dorothy Napangardi’s expansive canvas Untitled 2005 and Angelina George’s My imagined country - rock face 2006, imbue the topographical elements of the Australian landscape with mythological significance, rooted in an essential and enduring connection to Country. Frederick McCubbin’s Rainbow over Burnley 1910, on the other hand, reveals the appropriation and exploitation of landscape for industry. Similarly, Brodie Ellis’ video The Crystal World 2016 depicts landscape not as environment but as object, with found footage of mining detonations reconfigured in reference to science fiction and potential futures. While John Farmer’s picturesque mid-century etchings invoke familiar comfort, the strange otherworldliness of certain landscapes becomes apparent when considered objectively. In a contemporary context, Hanna Tai’s Botany Ostranenie series of 2010 de-familiarises nature to highlight its peculiarity as a system of forms and energies. Outside the entrance to the gallery, her flag titled Not not not not (Invisible Substance) 2013 draws attention to the wind as an unseen environmental force. Disturbances to this delicate system of forces are becoming increasingly apparent through climate change, yet nature’s destructive energies are often more blatant. Photographs from John Gollings’ 2009 Aftermath series document Victoria’s Black Saturday bushfires, and the precise coordinates in the title of each image highlight the physical location and very real effect of such events on the planet. This exhibition draws on predominantly two-dimensional works which range in scale from Hanna Tai’s Botany Ostranenie series to Dorothy Napangardi’s Untitled canvas. These are displayed to evince their various sympathies and dissonances, yet all works have an equivalence in how they resonate with a truth of the Australian landscape.”

Simon Lawrie The Balnaves Curator of Australian Sculpture November 2017