Payne’s Grey - Essay by Christine Morrow

All that is solid melts into air

Marx & Engels The Communist Manifesto
1848 (trans. Samuel Moore)    

Paula Payne’s paintings disturb states of matter. The artist uses chemical and physical properties of paint to collapse the categories of sky, soil, rock, water and ice. She coaxes hesitant forms from her brush but even as she conjures them into being, she suppresses them. Through layers and veils of paint, shapes emerge and are stifled. By muddling the paint Payne muddies the waters.

Painting is a material, physical, chemical process. To paint is to distribute liquid over a surface, typically paper, canvas, or wood. Of course, the most subversive painters use aerosols and their preferred substrate is masonry but that’s a story for another day. In the process of painting, liquid becomes solid. Polymer paints and watercolours dry through evaporation of water. Oils and enamels dry first by off-gasing their solvents and then through the reaction between oxygen and linoleic acids or resins. Encaustic paints dry by surrendering their heat to the atmosphere. That’s physics and that’s chemistry.

If painting relies on the transformation of matter between states, so does climate change. Land, water and sky appear to neatly align themselves with the states of solid, liquid and gas. It would be convenient if they occupied fixed zones as well as fixed states. Yet global warming sees them break their bounds: solid becomes liquid in the melting of polar ice caps; oceans swell, and sea levels rise; ozone gas depletes.

Payne manifests environmental anxieties by employing elisions, doubts and uncertainties in her painting technique. Her glazes are hazes and her scumbles are stumbles. There is deliberate confusion in the iconography too. Contour lines could be escarpments, ridges of open-cut mines, watercourses, or terrace farming. In Time Trace [2020] there is a hint of an underground cavern or alternatively, a detail from the realm of astronomy. Large, pale shapes in the similarly named Geological Time Trace [2020] might be crystals, eroded buttes, pinnacles or melting stalagmites. Payne’s content traverses grey areas.

 Payne’s paintings incorporate solids. Sometimes these solids are perversely abstract and hollow like the geometric forms that seem to levitate over the surface of some of her canvases. Her paintings are liquid too. There is no impasto. The paint is laid on thin. Like water, her paint finds its own level. Like gas, her ethereal painted fields expand effortlessly to fill the space within the frame. These atmospheric effects are a smokescreen and a blanket of smother.

I thought I was on strong footing when I was taught in school that the physical world could be neatly categorised as solid, liquid or gas. Around the time I learned that Pluto was still a Disney dog but no longer a planet, I discovered there is a fourth state of matter. Previously missing from the trinity was plasma. Plasma is a shifty concept. Like liquid, it has no fixed shape; like gas, it has no definable volume either. Its form cannot be contained. The space it occupies is indeterminate. Positive charges roam free. Plasma is a useful metaphor for understanding Paula Payne’s depictions of the natural world. She paints in a ‘plasmatic’ way: highly charged, but slippery in its volumes and indeterminate in its forms.

In Chemistry, sublimation refers to the process when a solid becomes a gas without first passing through a liquid phase. In psychoanalysis, sublimation refers to a desire for an object and its simultaneous disavowal through deferral, deflection or displacement. This displacement typically takes the form of chanelling the disavowed desire into a ‘higher purpose’ like making art. Payne’s practice encapsulates both senses of the word. She uses symbolic representations of states of matter in mid-transformation to conjure change and uncertainty. She funnels the deflections and displacements into a higher purpose, producing anxious, unstable images that act as a warning: the natural world is a site of insecurity, risk and loss.

Christine Morrow 
Brisbane, July 2021

Christine Morrow is an artist, curator and writer. She is a member of Association Internationale des Critiques d'Art.

 christinetoussaintemorrow@gmail.com