Essay/ Process/ Elyss McCleary, Essay published in Artist Profile, Issue 68, 2023 https://artistprofile.com.au/elyss-mccleary/ Upfront / Previews/ Elyss McCleary, A Tender Anchor’ Art Collector Magazine, issue 103, January - March 2023, pages 50 -51 Notes on A Room, for A Journey Around my Room ,Island Island Bus Projects online , 2021 https://vimeo.com/497863807 These Days, curator talk with Sebastian Goldspink, 2020 https://youtu.be/LqyYNQbqBfU
Outline Imager Exhibition essay by Madeline Simm, November 2022 Chroma/s Exhibition essay by Tiarney Miekus, April 2022 The Studio Spaces Exhibition essay by Michael Schwartz, February 2020 What’s Happening Here? Catalogue essay by Brigid Hansen, March 2017 Estimating a Fort Exhibition essay by Damien Lentini, February 2013 Shutter Speed Luminosity Exhibition essay by Aden Rolfe, August 2010
( scroll down to read exhibition essays)
Outline Imager for Elyss McCleary
By Madeline Simm
Diagonal beams of peach, cobalt blue, lemon yellow. Rust-brown sheath, blue hands.
Autonomous, the paintings look outwards. Mirrored proportions face each other in an exchange. The viewer encounters whilst being encountered. The room becomes echoed through doubling.
Light through windows touches a canvas gradually then swallows it. A material with its voice reverberating. Window geometry, upright standing.
Distorted shadows morph into a divided archway wedge. Sheen and flow.
Night and day interchange around and within the paintings. Torsos of feelings, the heights of feelings. Elements of this place’s history inform without interruption, without tripping up the viewer and a painter’s message. The copper paint is sincere and so is her humour. Sweetly B-grade horror green. Ambiguous historical reference and a film nod.
Murmured motifs become live wires. Cinema trope. Paintings as portals.
A process-based body seeks depth, though is physically flat.
Layered time and memories, thin enough to stack and harmonise. All there together in the painting. Americana sherbet. Monumental surrealism leaks and weaves then is rendered in paint. Glowing copper.
Outstretched sporting fields lay over nature. Expansive form, sky/sea horizon. A window through dust-storm orange and salt at the back of a mind. Manufactured horizons mimic the Earth. A light show.
Nightwalking past shadows on a soft-grey concrete factory wall.
Receding blue sky backdrop. Six or seven horizons. She alludes to rules, an energy whirring beneath and calm above. Dreamlike excess, dramatic painters. A substantive process. Green at the front, orange behind. Visual tricks of the horizon. Spiral bounce and catch. Watery light. Casual phone photography isolates the beautiful within the ordinary. A painter’s eye and heart. Blue-green expectation, hands that control, touch, care, draw. Hands expressing gratitude, confusion, a warm greeting. See you soon.
A sense of possibility. Layers of light and shadow are gateways to look across. An eternal surface implies freedom. Playful mesh grid over falling reflections, golden water. Transient time frame, both space and subject. What does it feel like to look at a painting? An image outline seeps into the building that holds it. Hands holding brushes. Hands holding her cat.
Madeline Simm is an artist and writer based in Naarm/ Melbourne https://www.madelinesimm.com/
Chroma/s
By Tiarney Miekus
Painting might be Elyss McCleary’s chosen form, but colour is the real devotion of her art and life. From hues that are luminous and strident, to moments of recession or haze, to a carefully chosen palette that alluringly sets beauty alongside disagreeability, Elyss clearly holds belief in the potential of colour, and then gifts this to us. But what, exactly, is this fascination?
When Elyss speaks to me about experiencing colour, there’s an emotional intensity and earnestness: a feeling of being so in touch with the world, or a certain passing moment, and being compelled to reflect this through oil paint, making marks across the canvas. These moments can come from anywhere: looking out the lounge room window, scrolling through media, twilight walks along the local creek, the whooshing colours of a passing cyclist, extravagances of fashion, shadows, domestic surfaces, a neon sign, the lines of bodies, the movement of light. Even just glancing across the room, Elyss sees a composition of colour in space.
Yet Elyss also thinks of the canvas as a stage—which might mean that painting is the performance of interactions of spaces. I was fortunate to witness this in action: I first saw Sea Cleavage, Stripey shirt when it was a nascent creation, an initial painting of thick blue and black horizontal stripes. Six weeks later it was transformed; the painting had both transcended its underlying grid to something more curved, almost fertile or intimate, while still maintaining its underlying strength of line. Glowing colours are unexpectedly set against murkiness and garishness; there is a careful layering that smartly calls attention to the multiple words in the painting. I looked from a red line to a curving blue—and then back again. And finally, I glimpsed those two green dots in the upper-left corner, which despite being so miniscule, centre the entire composition.
In this way, Elyss is a painter’s painter. Her structuring is oblique, rarely centred or symmetrical; she makes use of the horizon line; many paintings have a framing colour along the outside that is integral to how the other colours of the painting are received; she sets up colours that normally wouldn’t sit alongside one another, such as warm and cool hues that textbook theory says wouldn’t last long together, or the diverging blues in Moonlight Wetlands, which produce an image as harmonious and meditative as it is unsettling and provocative. Elyss’s previous paintings often inform the next work, and there is a sense of both maintaining and relinquishing control in her marks; she’ll let a drip slide where it may, allowing the painting to guide itself.
Intuition is central to this. Elyss never begins a painting knowing the outcome. She explained to me how, at the moment of painting, there’s both a hesitancy and a forthrightness in her marks—and this feels evident. Some paintings have long slashing, almost violent lines, others are exquisitely structured layers, like Early morning Skyscape graffiti / curious egg, a painting almost overwhelming in its feeling. This isn’t a feeling of anything in particular; it is simply feeling.
Elyss’s physicality is felt throughout, especially as there is nowhere to hide in an abstract painting that puts colour first. There is no subject to retreat into or symbolism to explain. It reminds me how Mark Rothko once declared, “A painting is not a picture of an experience; it is an experience.” He knew, intuitively and technically, how to engineer this experience; it’s said that people would break down and cry in front of his paintings, so overcome by the colours. Elyss’s paintings share this quality of experience
And yet—it’s also a habit that we search for recognisability in abstract forms, and in Elyss’s paintings I see glimmers of joy and restlessness. We talked about the formative moments of Elyss’s practice, how she spent 27 years spent working in the community health services, but also spent time making her work. We spoke about things like the ageing female body; intimacy and relationships; notions of care and loneliness, but then also determination, and the importance of community connection. We discuss painting as purpose, and she shares influences like the contemporary artists Fiona Longhurst and Mignon Steele, alongside historical painters such as Édouard Vuillard, Agnes Pelton and Cy Twombly. None of this is what the paintings are ‘about’—but they are things Elyss thinks about. Unconsciously and consciously, all of this bears on the painting form, where Elyss arrests the sensations she feels, playing a game of colour, sense and memory.
By responding to a world of colour with colour, Elyss’s title Fandangle Chroma/s is perfectly chosen: the mistaken frivolity of ‘fandangle’, a word of adornment, frippery and ornamentation, is attached to the force of chroma: the purity, the utter vitality and intensity, of experiencing each shade as tender and strong in its significance, while also relating to another.
Tiarney Miekus is a writer, editor, podcaster and communicator based in Melbourne / Naarm. She is currently Editor and Podcast Producer at Art Guide Australia. https://tiarneymiekus.com/about/
The Studio Spaces
By Michael Schwartz
The studio spaces at Arts Project Australia always hum with abundant creative energy. At any one time, up to forty neuro-diverse artists of all ages, backgrounds and abilities paint, draw, etch, make ceramics, create sculptures or construct videos and zines as they explore ways of seeing and being. The enthusiasm and camaraderie in the studios are palpable. To say the creation of an environment like this is not an easy task is an understatement - it relies on the energy and sensitivity of the practicing staff artists who give their assistance and expertise.
The label ‘Outsider Artist’ is controversial and marginalises the work produced by neuro-diverse artists who create beyond the generally accepted codes of the art academic mainstream. However, I would like to suggest the term ‘Insider Artists’ to describe the talented and dedicated staff artists who mentor and support the Arts Project Australia artists.
As Will Gompertz reminds us in his book – ‘Think Like an Artist’ – artists need to be enterprising, brave, seriously curious, and not afraid of failure. These skills are difficult to learn and maintain even for neurotypical people.
An ‘Insider’ means being willing and able to tap into, and draw out, the potentialities of the studio artists who are grappling with a range of challenges and issues. It requires an understanding and empathic approach, as well as a flexibility and dynamism that can see and encourage the possibilities in ‘different voices’. But more than this, it needs an ability to ‘see and think outside the mainstream’ so that ongoing conversations, problem-solving and critical discussion can enhance the artistic practice of others.
The sixteen Arts Project Australia staff artists in this exhibition bring a wealth of experience from their own longstanding and diverse art careers. Many staff artists show their work nationally and internationally and their work is acknowledged through prizes and by being included in public and private collections. Their involvement with Arts Project Australia is frequently longstanding.
These artists are true ‘Insiders’. They know that enabling and sharing is not a one way street. It is often said that once you are part of Arts Project you never leave and the experience never leaves you.
Michael Schwarz is board member, art enthusiast, and friend of Arts Project Australia
https://www.stonehouse-glasshouse.com/about
What’s Happening Here?
By Brigid Hansen
Brigid Hansen is a Naarm/Melbourne based writer, curator and performer with an interest in humour, feminism and queer art and culture.
Estimating a Fort
By Damien Lentini
The work of Elyss McCleary operates at the interstices between the personal and the mass-produced; the autobiographical and the found/disregarded object. Scouring and combining fragments from both the wall and the page, her works re-enact the fragmented, citational and ultimately futile search for self within the mediated, contemporary city. However, rather than reading the works as some form of modern-day codex of urban alienation, the gestural and frenetic markings that operate over, under and around these collected fragments speaks of an awareness of the futility inherent within the search for any form of defined subjectivity beyond that which is notational, cursory or transitory. In this manner, McCleary's calligraphic mark-makings combine with the chance abstractions created by the deterioration of the paper and cardboard (via pollution, wear and/or acts of vandalism); resulting in a series of sometimes violent and confrontational encounters across both the individual page and the series as a whole.
This combination of torn and over-painted fragments and gestures recalls Raymond Hains' affches lacérées of the 1950s and 60s. In a similar manner to Hains, McCleary's use of these disparately acquired, (de)constructed and lacerated materials constitute a contemporary tableaux of the inner-urban experience; visualising the interconnected processes and links between destruction and creation, the objects of fine arts and the artefacts of popular culture. However, rather than reconstituting these elements in the form of some sort of defined social or personal critique, McCleary's removal and defacement of these elements do not leave open the possibility for reuse or recontextualisation. In order words, they are not, in the grand tradition of collage, free-foating signifiers, restlessly searching out for a signified to attach themselves to. Rather, McCleary's deliberate and irreversible erasure of practically all identifiable elements within her fragments recalls instead Wolf Vorstell's concept of décollage; that is, an act of continuous destruction and removal that mirrors the gradual build up and deterioration of the human body as it grows older.
Viewing these gestures and continual reworkings as contemporary instances of décollage, also emphases the somewhat contradictory nature of the word itself; of which Vorstell was very acutely aware. Pertaining both to the “take off of an aircraft as well as the tearing away from an adhesive surface”,1 McCleary's accumulation of torn, altered and decomposed elements evokes both the transitory and 'throwaway' nature of contemporary travel and consumption, as well as the destructive/creative dialectic that underpins Western epistemology.
Regarded in this manner, the densely-packed series of compositional elements that constitute a work such as Interior Wall 3 can be seen to harbour an internal and unresolved tension that, if left unchecked, has the potential to burst apart. Yet to speak of these works simply in terms of oppositional centrifugal/centripetal dynamics and tensions is to overlook the moments of compositional clarity created by the waves of defined colour saturation within a work such as Violent Word. This, combined with the almost staccato caesuras of the black lines within the work The Etched Pinks, results in a series of gestures that transcend the confines of the picture plane; calling out and responding to other elements and configurations within neighbouring and adjacent compositions.
Taken as a whole then, the reverberations created by this synaesthesic exchange of elements and tensions imbue McCleary's works with a resonance that befits the thematic of the exhibition. As both concrete signifying enunciations of individual character, as well as part of a larger bricolage of the contemporary urban environment.
1 Wolf Vorstell, “décoll/age”, in Art and Artists 1, no.2, August, 1966: p.9
Damian Lentini is a curator at Haus der Kunst in Munich. He has taught art history and theory of contemporary art at the University of Melbourne and worked on various exhibition projects in Australia and Germany. https://www.hausderkunst.de/en/
Shutter Speed Luminosity
By Aden Rolfe
An angle of light creates a mood of unease. Its to do with the setting, the time of day, a light wind. There’s a familiarity in it, the feeling, that you’ve known it before, but also the sense that somethings out of place. You cant put your finger on it, but it unsettles what was otherwise an uneventful afternoon.
In ‘Shutter Speed Luminosity’ Elyss McCleary captures these moments in uncertain scenes, underpinned by cinematic construction. Figures are blurred, details merge with their surroundings, images are smudged. The locations - supermarkets, conference centres, parklands - are at once identifiable and anonymous. Light and colour are amplified and distorted, at times verging on the lurid - green tinged yellows, salmon pinks, vivid oranges- while elsewhere, the desaturation is haunting.
These works are not without nostalgia, a feeling that’s reinforced by their cinematic framing. Each painting is banded by a black strip across the top and bottom, transforming the still lifes into film stills.Each set then becomes an undefined plot sequence, grouped together by location, evoking an unexplained narrative.Even the range of colour and hue seem to occur by adjusting aperture and contrast more than changing palette.
There’s a degree of parody here, too. Awareness and choice. The use of yellow, for example is based on a survey of anxiety - inducing colours. It’s deliberately used to provoke, while the moments are deliberately constructed to unsettle, and deliberately staged to appear as if through a lens. And so we discover within the choice of location as well. While most of the settings are banal and suburban, the series around a country house sits somewhere between the romantic and the gaudy, with pinks and greens threatening to capsize the would be earnest images. The scenes play out as a calmly disturbing narrative of paranoia, underpinned by a sardonic sense of humour.
Paranoia and anxiety thus occur in “Shutter Speed Luminosity” less as themes and more as emotional responses. In particular. as a reaction to the play of light in place. McCleary’s work is about acknowledging the responses as at once serious, unsettling,embarrassing and funny. Looking at the paintings, you cant pick whats been added or removed to create the sense of unease. But you can appreciate that at certain times, in certain places, where the light angles in a certain way, there’s a system that brings on that particular disquiet and foreboding.
Aden Rolfe is a poet, writer and editor based in Eora/Sydney. https://redroompoetry.org/poets/aden-rolfe/