Colin Pennock: Journey to Paradise | Ben Hedstrom: Allisions

Colin Pennock: Journey to Paradise | Ben Hedstrom: Allisions

Noosa Regional Gallery – 8 February – 30 March 2025

Opening Night – text written by Michael Brennan, Gallery Director | Noosa Regional Gallery

There are some obvious similarities between the practices of Colin and Ben. Both artists primarily embrace landscape as a subject matter, and both do so with a loose and gestural mark-making, and with a heightened approach to colour, that fills their paintwork with energy and movement. And the landscapes tackled by both artists are informed by experience – and not just visual experience – but the experience of being in a place and part of a place – the intersection of place and person as opposed to a landscape simply being something you look out onto from a distance. Early on in the development of these exhibitions, I wondered whether the echoes of methodology and interest would result in a pairing of shows that looked too similar – that maybe the individual personalities and practices and nuanced priorities of each artist might get overlooked through a summary lumping together of painterly style. Of course, a discerning eye can clearly see differences in the ways Colin and Ben approach their work and apply their paint. And each of their particular conceptual framings of landscape are quickly revealed to anyone who casts more than a cursory glance across their works. But the additional thing that sets these two exhibition projects apart is the way that each of the artists has been open to thinking and talking about how an exhibition in a public gallery – free from many of the considerations of a commercial show – allows for a shift away from paintings as discrete objects, and rather an embrace of the installation as an experience and encounter of its own.

BEN HEDSTROM

I learned a new word from Ben. And while I’m not sure that a walk along the beach is, strictly speaking, a nautical activity, the term ‘allision’ seems to be principally applied to the seafaring world. An ‘allision’ can be differentiated from a ‘collision’, with the latter describing two moving objects striking one another, while ‘allisions’ – the title of Ben’s exhibition – refers to moving objects making contact with a stationary ones. While the conventional use of the term is more readily used to describe a boat impacting a bridge – for example – Ben poetically coopts the word to describe the experience of the body – a moving object – connecting with the landscape – a stationary one. More specifically – in this context – the term is taken up as a metaphor for a moment of connection – a deep and thoughtful and felt connection with a landscape as the body moves through it, and drinks it in, and is subsumed by its surrounds.

I’m going to read a paragraph from Ben’s artist statement here:

When our bodies intersect with the landscape, a harmonious fusion occurs, blurring the boundaries between human existence and the surrounding environment. We perceive its hues, textures, and contours; we feel the solidity of its surfaces and the contrasts they offer. The air carries distinct scents - saltwater, earth, vegetation - while kinetic forces like wind, waves, and shifting geological formations imbue the landscape with palpable energy.

Part of what I think Ben is describing here is a de-centring of the person in the environment, and a removal of the differentiation and hierarchy between perceiver and perceived. There’s a humbling recognition in this attitude that the distinction between human and nature – people and place – is a false one, and that all of the infinite worlds anchored in subjective experiences across ever-passing time are really just overlapping interplays of sense and sensation – intimate encounters with a potential to reveal a staggering whole – for those of us willing to wrap ourselves in a place rather than try to wrangle it or hold it at arm’s length. I feel like there’s also a recognition of these bubbles of experience, as well as the fallibility of our personal takes on the world, in the recurrent rockpools of Ben’s paintings – consciously or not. The way our own experiences of the world swim in a sea of possible encounters seems akin to the microcosms of the rockpool – a limited and insular world on the fringe of a teeming ocean. The challenge Ben rises to, however, is to capture this otherworldliness without falling into twee depictions of starfish and coral and crabs. Instead, these watery sanctuaries are shown as abstracted worlds where what we can see is plural and askew. Rather than focussing on sea creatures, among Ben’s subjects is the bending of light as it plays with our perception of distance and gives us a wobbly distortion of depth. Likewise, the intersecting and conflicting perspectives of the rockpools’ inner worlds and the soaring skies reflected on their surfaces remind us that where we stand and what we choose to train our attention on informs our understanding of the world – reminds us of how slippery our sense of reality actually is.

When taken in as a whole, Ben’s exhibition is not dissimilar to a stroll along a coastline – irrespective of the fact that most of these paintings are depictions of different places spanning Yaroomba to Noosa Heads. Headlands usher us towards exposed rocky shelves, our attention jumping from rockpool to rockpool before our path is interrupted by yet another outcrop, forcing us to lift our gaze to crumbling cliffs – these, too, in a perpetual state of movement, only metered in a different time. The exhibition wraps us in a sense of place – drawing us in close – just another element of the environment ourselves. And Ben’s application of paint – in daubs and dabs – further dissolves and dismantles the distinction between things – between ocean and land and sky. While we can still make out their shapes and forms, the treatment of paint and surface almost atomises them, again proposing that these things – like ourselves – are less separate than we commonly assume.

COLIN PENNOCK

This particulate approach to applying paint is perhaps even more pronounced in Colin’s paintings. Where Ben’s landscapes hold together with tightly packed jabs of colour and tone, large areas of Colin’s works appear to almost disintegrate and hang in the air.

Before I get into talking about Colin’s work, I wanted to share something about my experience of working with artists who’ve had extensive commercial gallery careers like Colin has. We typically work on a number of solo exhibitions with artists each year, and although I’m always familiar with the artist’s usual way of working – and particularly when it comes to well established artists, what their practice is renown for – I almost always have a conversation early on in the exhibition’s development about exploring possibilities and considering shaking things up. You’re never sure how these conversations are going to be received, but as I said to Colin during one of our first meetings, an exhibition in a public gallery like ours presents some possibilities that might not be available to an artist in a commercial gallery setting. In order to keep their doors open, a gallery that represents artists has to sell work. But because that’s not a condition that we operate under, there’s a certain amount of freedom afforded an artist working with us – an option to explore projects that might not usually be viable in other settings.

Now, Colin is no stranger to making larger work. And I’m typically not approaching a painter whose work I admire and suggesting that they turn their hand to ceramics for the first time, for example, or some other completely unfamiliar way of working. But I did say to Colin that he might like to consider looking at directions in his work, or approaches to installing his work, that are ambitious and new if that was of interest to him – and that might include sparser or more focussed hangs, or working at a scale not usually available to him. Often when I have these conversations with artists – as creative people – their eyes light up and you can see them thinking through possibilities.

However, we usually work with artists towards these solo projects for maybe 18 months in advance of their exhibition, and I’m always surprised by how often – really often – an artist with a long history of almost exclusively exhibiting in a commercial gallery, gradually winds back the excitement and ambition that this kind of freedom affords them, and they revert to the safe space of the type and scale of work that they are most use to. I’m not saying this is a bad thing. It’s not my place to tell an artist how they go about their work. But what I do see my role as partly being is as a provocateur – for both artists and audiences – and I was thrilled to see that Colin didn’t shy away from the provocation I’d presented him with and – indeed – exceeded my expectations with the ambition of this project. I’ve written about Colin’s work before and have made a number of visits to his studio in Noosa’s Hinterland where I’ve had some fantastic conversations about art and nature and life – with both Colin and his partner Katrina, who is also a painter. And I think what Colin’s paintings do – and what this ambitious installation right here does particularly well – is open up a space for these conversations to kind of move between, and flow in and out of, without being prescriptive or didactic.

Colin paints landscapes – but they’re almost always on the cusp of dissolving and disappearing. They are rarely actual places – or at least not singular places or places that he is trying to represent so that you might recognise them as somewhere you’ve been or would like to go. In fact, sometimes there is very little that is recognisable of a place at all. Instead, memory and movement are co-located with his reflections on place, and because of this, his paintings resist being fixed. Perhaps it’s fairer to say that, instead of landscapes, Colin’s paintings are fields of activity, comprised of impressions of places and spaces – some real, some imagined – where a sense of time is infused with the other spatial dimensions. The spaces he depicts revel in a kind of ambiguity – a mutability – shifting from solid to liquid to gas, rarely fully committing to any of these states. I’ve previously written that “they stir and rise, sink and thrust into different parts of the picture plane, rushing forward and draining away – much like the swell of the ocean displaced against the shore, following the fall of the sand and negotiating the topography of any outcrops it might encounter.” But now I recognise they also push forward of the picture plane, while also negotiating its imagined territory, with masses of painterly texture and colour exciting the eye.

At our last studio visit – having just loaded up this monumental work, ready to transport to the Gallery – we sat on the balcony overlooking Colin’s studio and spoke about the weather and the trees and the abundance of dragon flies that hovered above the nearby canopies and the butterflies that also floated nearby and who they might have been in a past life. With the memory of these ideas and impressions fresh in my mind, this epic painting came to life with new possibilities for me – even while we were installing it. I started to recognise in Colin’s mark making, abstracted reference to the winged creatures that joined us while we sipped our coffee. Perhaps butterflies are a bit naff, but I definitely started to entertain the idea of a collection of mixed red, yellow and green paint splotches blurring into a flock of Rainbow Lorikeets darting across the picture plane. And perhaps even more in line with my somewhat darker lens, a rush of green-brown paint scrapes evoking a swarm of locusts or wasps. Of course, they’re not there. I brought them with me. And I think that this is – in part – what is so compelling about Colin’s paintings… they speak to the beat and rhythm of time and change while leaving space for memory and reflection on the part of whoever takes them in.

I had a great moment in the Gallery earlier in the week – one that you’d think I’d experience more frequently given what my job is and where I spend my days. What I got to do on Tuesday – after several hours on installing this work and after everyone else had left the space – was to simply sit quietly with this painting for about 15 or 20 minutes and let my eye meander across and in and out of its surface while my mind wandered and I forgot about all the noise that usually clutters our days. And I’ve since returned to spend similar time with Ben’s work, and again with Colin’s as well.

I highly recommend you make the time to do the same.