The Weather In My Head

By Chris Holdaway

Georgie Hill - Concave Iridescence

Visions, September 2020

Georgie Hill’s watercolour inventions are everything good theory has told us abstraction shouldn’t be: decidedly layered instead of striving for bold flatness; avidly literary instead of appealing to objectivity. This all the while achieving feats of cohesion which should make even the most arch modernist proud: the washed surfaces with stark and colourful incisions give the firm impression of mixed media and constructive applications when there really is nothing but paint and paper. It’s these kinds of grey allegiances and material complexities that can really get you excited about painted patterns on a surface in the 21st Century.

Spectral Signature (2), 2020

Spectral Signature (4), 2020

Like most abstraction, these works are in part about working out how their permutations of features may align or contrast, assert themselves or experience some measure of chaos. The decision arenas in Hill’s intricate landscapes are three-fold. First the hazy field governed by either blue or green, with transitional tones of yellow, red, and peach; sometimes with an overall air of darkness but more often vibrantly popping. Then the triangles cut into thick watercolour paper that blots and swells with pulses of primary colour — as if to place Mondrian’s blocks inside the lines this time — configured with either left-right symmetry or a chiral feel of opposable thumbs that may be uneven but are a long way from unbalanced. Another breed of incision leaves the paper’s pale grain exposed; a vacuum for thoughts such as: how many of me should there be?, should I cross over myself or spiral in space?, to admit only smooth curves or take some sharp corners? The order of presentation here is artificial: with each visit to one of Georgie’s exhibitions I’ve overheard spirited debate as to which aspect spectators believe came first.

Hill’s 2020 show Concave Iridescence (1–26 September at Visions gallery in Auckland, New Zealand) follows Residence Within A Prism from 2019; the works at once recognisable even as they offer new developments. The triangular vocabulary remains familiar, while the painted ground is freer, endorsing a wider range of tones and gestures, and the white incisions are far more profuse and frantic than what we have seen before. The sense of anxiety that one can feel going into each painting is certainly magnified — and who could blame her — but it’s not as simple as the output turning into a commensurable mess. Perhaps counter-intuitively, as each element ratchets up its own nervous complexity, overall integration actually seems to increase; the heightened competition pulling everything together. In a sense these newer pieces are harder to look at, offering fewer easy points of separation to focus the eyes upon, but they are richer for it. If these are pictures of escalating disquiet, even dread, they are also of actively working through each incursion, and not resignation.

Concave Iridescence (2), 2020

Adaptation Sequence (2), 2019

At a time of perpetual crisis, when an honest relation to the material world is more important than anything else, Hill’s personal materialism asks us to consider deeply the structures we seek to impose, the control mechanisms we deploy, and the reactions we must encounter. The storms are rising in their intensity, encroaching into the semblance of ordered and linear vector space. We can reach for any number of tenuously depictive metaphors here. Say meteorological diagrams and our forecast abilities in the face of increasingly extreme weather events — a reading the artist has spoken publicly about and alluded to with titles such as ‘Forecast Detail’. Or pulses of data packets in GPS triangulated global logistics networks that have turned much of the world — certainly what McKenzie Wark calls ‘the over-developed world’ — into a ravenously consuming machine. Yet for all the expressions of excess, we should also reckon with the unavoidable entropy on display, for no amount of paint stripper or re-priming can ever un-incise the paper. These works demonstrate the tremendous risk of being in the world in a way that few paintings are able, and can suggest an ethical question: what if every act were taken with the care necessary for being truly honest about its irreversibility? This is their chief melancholic aspect to me; not the watercolour mood, but the insistence that, in spite of what we see in overwhelming volume, such thinking is not only possible, but already exists.

Both Concave Iridescence and Residence Within A Prism take significant cues from literature: the earlier exhibition finding the titles of its works in Doris Lessing’s novel Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), the latter responding to thoughts and images from Anna Kavan’s novel Ice (1967). For Hill, science fiction in particular offers a model for being that is self-consciously and inescapably involved in making the world as it goes, of deciding how it will be at the same time as acting in it. We may correlate the anxiety latent in Hill’s paintings with Lessing’s depiction of many different fantasy environments from the interior space of madness, and Kavan’s tale of climate catastrophe in the wake of nuclear war with Hill’s explicit ecological concerns. This is not to suggest of course that these authors are telling us how the world should be, but they do have to decide how it is in their narratives, no matter what else is said. This kind of thinking opens up the opportunity for technics over generic utopianism in a way that dovetails with the artist’s attention to material process and detail, for the decision to mine rare earth metals for manufacturing solar panels is not different in kind from that of firing a power station with coal.

Georgie has also revealed the importance of her studies concerning early abstractionists who were women, particularly Hilma af Klint (1862–1944), whose startling early experiments compel us to rewrite the art history that launches the pictorial revolution from Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian (see the major 2018–19 Guggenheim exhibition Paintings for the Future). If something so seemingly solid as hard abstraction can have its foundations reorganised, what else is up for grabs in the gross material world? The state of play calls for all kinds of exploratory thinking, and Hill’s interest in artists like af Klint, Madge Gill, and Georgina Houghton extends to their occult activities as spirit mediums. In the triangular forms of her own paintings it is easy to see icons such as the Platonic solids, the ichthys, or even the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. And in 2019 the watercolour ground was overall a fairly uniform texture, while for the two largest works in the 2020 show in particular the ‘storm’ seems to be opening up to the possibility of revelation. My qualification here is not so much to conjecture whether these works are exhortations to the supernatural; Hill’s knowledge of and research into these women’s lives and work is in any case a matter of concrete historical reality. Rather, whatever our systems of knowledge (e.g. meteorology), we need always to consider what might exceed them. This is in a sense the movement between Residence Within A Prism and Concave Iridescence.

Concave Iridescence (4), 2020

Like most art concerned with formal experimentation, Hill’s paintings are highly iterative, and abundant with trial and error. In addition to the main exhibition room for Concave Iridescence, there is a collection of small collages or ‘notes’that together serve as a lens into what made the current body of work possible. Here the layering and apliqué is more literal, with attached segments exceeding boundaries, and subtractive cuts that can go all the way through to the gallery walls. What is perhaps most extraordinary about Georgie’s procedures is that these separate techniques are absorbed into the final paintings not as additional material, but produced only from what is already there, like a kind of conjuring trick. It bears repeating: there really is nothing other than paint on a single sheet of paper. Here we may draw a contrast with the art of Cat Fooks, the other comparably tactile ‘painter’ currently working in New Zealand, whose creations are truly cumulative. The stark diagonals of alternating colour in Hill’s triangular frames might also recall Ian Scott’s Lattices, which (as I have written about elsewhere) pose their own challenges when thinking about the illusion of layered space.

Hope as a project is extremely hard work, and in many ways requires the same kind of indefatigable determination as the most intricate labour. Hill’s paintings are far from pictures of joy, but they are certainly of possibility; the productive compulsion of strife between flux and stricture; the dual necessity and impossibility of systematising. But neither are they capitulations to a hopelessly varied and incomprehensible world. This new show makes the previous event (which I loved) look almost tentative in comparison, her ventures becoming even more daring and energetic. These works are powerful and gripping both up close and at a distance, and moreover they are simply interesting. As interesting as anything in our arts today.