Home Of The Arts HOTA
20 Oct - 25 Nov 2018
Breathing in Trees: Nicola Moss
A GALLERY AT HOTA EXHIBITION
'It is the trees who bring me the answers. Or, rather, the right questions. Trees have their own language, booming from the bole, singing in their sap, sighing on the wind - most of the time we're just not listening.' - INGE SIMPSON, UNDER STORY (SYDNEY: HACHETTE, 2017). XV
I suspect that most Australians have at least one tree story, with tree climbing, tree houses, and their animal residents often enmeshed in childhood memories. The permanence and scale of these garden stalwarts attracts us to look up and into them, while walking among them is healing and their barks are restorative. Artist Nicola Moss lives in the Gold Coast hinterland, with a tall hoop pine tree that stands like a sentinel over her home studio. Her house is oriented around a garden and her outlook is over forests. Yet, this environment is in flux as land around her transitions to housing. The particular focus of her art practice of three decades - full time for the last thirteen years - has been depicting tensions between development and conservation. She comments, "I am interested in how we achieve a healthy environment, with real value to people, recognising that landscapes have been adapted many times."
A residency in Tokyo's Youkobo Art Space in 2017 facilitated new research into the adaptive nature of environments, and the way in which big city residents may improvise green space even in the tiniest of available areas. Moss walked the streets of Tokyo, photographing and observing the innovation with which residents created gardens. She also held an "open studio" where locals responded to a questionnaire about the value of gardens and greenspace, and their answers, which have been translated into English, are at the heart of the new works created for Breathing in Trees.
Her Tokyo wild series draws together elements of urban landscape (a gum boot, the breeze block backdrop, a trellis) enmeshed with foliage and vegetation. Subtitled Residents and architecture, plants are both, it offers a local's take on the green credentials of their neighbourhood. They give me quiet dialogue is more tranquil, with pages from books underlying the cut-out and printed plant life. Smaller works, which include the residents' words, echo their subject matter, with the poignant My house is surrounded by concrete showing a solo plant, pot overwritten, and taped sections of the image repressing elements below the concrete superstructure. I have two children would seem to begrudge the two discrete organic forms on its picture plane, which goes on poetically, "in the scenery of their growth, plants are necessary I suppose".
Both the narrative in these works and their seductive layers evoke the beauty of the forest and its depths that draw you in; they are subtle, persistent, and persuasive. My mother has been taking care of it is sparse, with coloured lines like crossed chop sticks either side of a central area of explosive organic growth. The tiny words to one side of this restrained garden continue on from the title, "... nurturing the soil with the leftovers of our supper".
Breathing in Trees accepts that change is inevitable and notes the beauty in what exists. Against the backdrop of the local and global environment in transition, Moss's interest in analysing what is important is gently appreciative. This exhibition shows her careful attention to "listening" to the language of trees.
Louise Martin-Chew, 2018.