Paula Payne ‘A View from The Edge’ Redlands Art Gallery _ 23rd June -13 August 2023
All Image Credits - Louis Lim
Writer Ronelle Clarke
Paula Payne has held many rolls within Visual Arts in Queensland including practicing artist, teacher, curator, and completed a Doctorate in Visual Arts in September 2021 at the Queensland College of Art. Since 2017 Paula returned to full time painting concentrating on investigating painting contemporary landscape. Her approach is both sensory and intellectual producing beautiful, evocative, dreamlike landscapes that subtly impart a sense of anxiety that questions humankinds’ impact on the natural environment.
Paula’s landscapes draw on traditions of the sublime that gives form to the awe inspiring and emotional power of nature. Ideas of the sublime in nature reflect on 19th century French landscape painting. Paula’s work however is very much grounded in today and the issues of our time.
The messages imbedded in her work are subtle and revealed slowly. This may be a sublime landscape, but it is also an Anthropocene landscape. In today’s world humans are the major force that impact on the environment. Even in the seemingly most pristine environments the human influence is visible. [1]
Paula enjoys the process of painting and applies multiple glazes of translucent paint in a free gestural manner to develop soft atmospheric surfaces that give an illusion of calm beauty. These glazes are often overlaid with fine straight lines. The straight lines of mapping longitude and latitude, vanishing points, fences, ladders, surveying marks. All refer to a means of owning or attempting to control and interpret nature. These human influences become a part of the environment Paula depicts, yet by mapping foreign elements the beauty of her natural world is not overpowered.
Aesthetically beautiful as these pieces are Paula still manages to impart an underlying sense of anxiety through this juxtaposition of unlikely forms, images, or marks. The impact of humankind may be present in Paula’s landscapes but there are no figures. This allows us, the viewer, to immerse ourselves in the landscape rather than stand outside it.
Although Paula’s work examines environmental global concerns her work is also personal. She paints what she knows, environments she has walked through, memories of places she has visited, or imagined. Several works in the exhibition explore the foreshores around the Redlands Coast, as in the series ‘Weather Patterns’. Paula’s interest here is an examination of where the sea meets the shore, shifting tides and ever-changing sandbars and weather patterns. This littoral zone is an insecure everchanging space.
In contrast, Paula’s large canvas ‘Architecture for Unknown Worlds’ presents the viewer with a lush rainforest where soft, translucent glazes of rainforest greens and turquoise are overlaid with fine organic lines of what could be read as vines, trees, veins, or root systems. Among these images a geometric structure of fine lines acts as a contrast to the soft colours and organic forms in the rest of the painting. Do these geometric lines represent a ladder, a tower, scaffolding? Other visible marks could be interpreted as the site of a theodolite or even a gun. It is not clear. These are however definitely man-made structures imbedded in or overlaying the natural world. This work like all of Paula’s landscapes gives the viewer no complete answers. It is an insecure space, a landscape of uncertainty.
These ethereal, atmospheric paintings can be interpreted in many ways by the viewer due to the juxtaposition of indeterminate forms and a deliberate confusion in iconography. As in her work ‘Enclosure’. What is the purpose of this enclosure? Is it a pool, a fence, a sporting field, a tennis court? Are we viewing a river, the sea, the sky? Or is it a flood plain? It is this slippage in the reading together with their aesthetic beauty that gives these painting their strength..
Writer and Artist-Ronelle Clarke
[1] The Anthropocene was termed in 2000 by Atmospheric researcher Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugine Stoermer. They suggested that retiring the the term Holocene was necessary to describe the current epoch and replaced it with the term Anthropocene that emphasized the central role, and the impact of humankind in geology and ecology. The new epoch is discussed as beginning around 1950.
Carrington:https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/29/declar-Anthropocene-epoch-experts-urge-geological-congress-human-impact-earth