Ghost flowers and zombie plants

Wagner Contemporary
2 Hampton Street
Paddington NSW 2021
Australia

Essay by Pippa Milne

Many people nowadays live in a series of interiors — home, car, gym, office, shops — disconnected from each other. On foot everything stays connected, for while walking one occupies the spaces between those interiors in the same way one occupies those interiors. One lives in the whole world rather than in interiors built up against it.[i]

Mark Hislop has an art studio within walking distance from his house. The walk between the two places takes him through the wide streets Brunswick, through North Fitzroy, across some intersections and over some four-lane roads, but also past fence after fence bordering yards and pavement. These suburbs were some of Melbourne’s immigrant neighbourhoods, and the yards would have been tended by men and women in the process of making Australia their home. Their gardens were filled with flowers, shrubbery and fruit trees — netted in springtime and heavy with fruit in summer, softening the straight lines of architecture, concrete paths and fences.

Of course, as is their want, plants don’t always keep within garden boundaries. Creepers peep through fences; branches overhang; weeds spring up in cracks; bushes sprout through to the pedestrian’s side. Unplanned and untamed, these botanicals appear to disobey the laws of the gardener.

With the utmost love and attention the man who walks must study and observe every smallest living thing, be it a child, a dog, a fly, a butterfly, a sparrow, a worm, a flower, a man, a house, a tree, a hedge, a snail, a mouse, a cloud, a hill, a leaf, or no more than a poor discarded scrap of paper on which, perhaps, a dear good child at school has written his first clumsy letters.[ii]

On his walks to the studio, Hislop photographs these escaping plants. In his images, their forms stretch and curl, leaves unfurling and tendrils spiraling. Only these botanical elements survive his subsequent process of gridding, drafting and transferring these images onto transparent acrylic sheets. What remains are the incidentals, which are now the protagonists of these quadrants.

The process of walking is often practical, getting one from A to B, but it is also in-between time in the most literal and also metaphorical way. Often, it’s in moments of limbo that interesting thoughts occur, or that something unformed in one’s mind becomes clear. Muscle memory takes over and the mind is left to rove. Observations become intuitive and clear thoughts can bubble to the surface. The practical habit of getting from home to the studio has become intimately involved in the making of the artwork.

The process of making these paintings is also bound up into this habit of walking. It is structured and laborious, but perhaps also meditative and driven by habit. The artist moves through the drafting process with logic and discipline, and once settled on the configuration within the frame, he applies paint backwards, starting with the surface of the image, which is viewed from the other side of the acrylic, working towards the background. In a right-brain, left-brain switcharoo, this inversion of the logical painting process makes for very conscious and hyper-sensitive renderings of the plants in question, and somewhat unusually, the weeds and the flyaway branches are the focus of the painterly gaze, rather than the prized blooms of traditional still life scenes.

———————————

[i] Rebecca Solnit, 2001

[ii] Robert Walser, 1939