Zoe Grey: Just Between us (catalogue essay)

Between Us

The only time that I have been to Marrawah, on the far north-eastern tip of Tasmania, the weather was foul. The skies (dark steel greys pierced by shafts of silver light) pelted us with salt raindrops, whipped horizontally by the fierce westerly, scouring our faces once we stepped out of the car. We walked on the beach for just a moment, ten minutes perhaps, before retreating to the car and leaving.

I start with this anecdote of a fleeting visit because it is almost the opposite of how Zoe Grey talks about Marrawah. Several generations of her family have lived in this isolated community; her experience is informed by a tacit, inherited understanding of its colours, rhythms, patterns, and textures. It is one of deep and enduring connection. It is difficult to write about Grey's paintings and not reflect on the almost unspeakable pull, or undertow, that a place can exert on us, both physically and mentally. Grey has sought a painterly language to convey this pull, creating an enduring visual record of the home that she knows profoundly; her paintings emerge out of the experience of being there. 

 She is immersed in the ocean swells, looking inland to Preminghana, waiting for the wave that will carry her back to the shore. She is engrossed in the track down from the family home, built by her father, through the rocks, to the beach. She is sitting with her mother, watching the evening skies.

But therein lies the tension in her work because when Grey paints Marrawah, she paints it in her studio in Hobart, hundreds of kilometres away; she is keenly aware that the paintings are themselves unique places formed in the daily practice of the studio, stroke after stroke, no one image ever quite enough to set the picture straight. Her sophisticated use of colour calls out to the colours Marrawah, and her deft gestures evoke the pathways of home. But Grey knows full well that the paintings are always between there and here.

Grey does not paint en plein air or from photographs. Her paintings are composite images of bodily experience coloured by memory. Viewing the paintings then is akin to the disorienting sensation of being in a location that exists as a collection of fleeting memories. They also suggest how the body remembers moving through a landscape focussed on the shape and texture of rocks to be clambered over, the wind-bent trees, and always, the scudding clouds above. This is not conventional western landscape painting in the sense that one has one's feet firmly planted in the one spot, the view to the horizon neatly framed. Rather, Grey's paintings evoke what philosopher Jeff Malpas would call an embodied rather than 'spectatorial' relationship with place.[1] Her paintings answer Edward Casey's call for paintings that speak to human 'emplacement' rather than trite visual resemblance.[2]

Grey's re-presentation is formed in the ritual task of painting every day; repeated motifs appearing, again and again, circulating through the body of work; an act of recalling sensation as much as the signalling of location. In other words, her paintings embody place rather than merely picture it. They are intimate distillations of a relationship with the land formed over decades. Yes, the depiction of rocks, plants, and landforms of Marrawah is essential to Grey, but so is the use of painting to locate memories and to speak of connection to the land beyond the visual, even when removed from it. It is the most difficult place to paint and the most compelling.

[1] Malpas, J (2011), 'Place and the problem of landscape', in Malpas J The place of landscape: concepts, contexts, studies. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, pp, 3-26.

[2] Casey, E (2002), Representing Place: Landscape Paintings and Maps, University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota, United States.

More information: Despard Gallery