VISITANTS - CLOSE ENCOUNTERS WITH REMOTE WESTERN AUSTRALIA

Participating artists

Consuelo Cavaniglia / Penny Coss / Berndnaut Smilde

Visitants brings together three acclaimed artists, working in response to one of Western Australia’s most haunting remote landscapes.

Consuelo Cavaniglia, Penny Coss, and Berndnaut Smilde share an interest in capturing moments of experience, particularly of the natural world, that inspire wonder, or a sense of personal revelation. At the heart of all three artists’ practices is the illusionary potential of colour and light, frequently employed to evoke sensual and transformative experiences. Cavaniglia utilises transparency, reflection, and colour relationships to confuse foreground and background, or disrupt the relationship between viewer and artwork, placing her audience in a state of pleasurable instability. Coss employs layering, carefully controlled staining, and scale to interpret her experience of the natural world via luminous abstract and collaged compositions. Smilde creates photographs, sculptures, and installations that aim to capture fleeting moments of revelation, often by recreating naturally-occurring phenomena such as clouds and rainbows. 

During 2016, each artist was commissioned by FORM to undertake a residency in Western Australia’s remote Pilbara region, and immerse themselves in a landscape that is almost hallucinatory in its harsh beauty and extremes of climate. Visitants comprises the outcomes of their field trips to Karijini National Park, home to some of the State’s oldest and most dramatic natural landforms. Their resulting artworks attempt to capture and interpret their time in this extraordinary place, with its vast natural monuments and continually-changing light, and where the fragility of the body becomes apparent in comparison to the age, hostility, and imposing majesty of the surrounding environment.

Curator Andrew Nicholls   Photographer Bewley Shaylor  for FORM