Four years
ago, Stephen Eastaugh asked me if I would write him a reference as
he was applying for the Humanities Programme for the Australian
Antarctic Division. He explained that they offer a berth only if
there is a spare spot as scientists always get first preference.
As it turned out, he was not successful that year and reapplied
every year for the next three until he was, at last, offered a
berth on the 1999/2000 Season, Voyage no 5, aboard the RSV Aurora
Australis.
I
recommended Eastaugh as the perfect artist for this programme as
experience of travel has been such a central theme in his work and
I was already familiar with the strange images that had come out
of his visits to Turkey, Iceland, Norway, Scotland, South America,
South East Asia, North & West Africa, Greenland, Bulgaria, The
Netherlands and the outback regions of Australia.
In 1995
Eastaugh wrote and artist’s statement for an exhibition in
Holland: “After thirteen years of moving about the planet I have
contracted the luxury of a non-stop cozy jet-lag disease. It seems
I have turned into a cosmopolitan, which means I am either one of
no fixed abode who is nowhere a foreigner or one of no fixed abode
who is everywhere a foreigner. The first definition is far too
utopian and romantic whilst the second is too sad and lonely. I
try to live and make pictures on the border of these two poles.”
Eastaugh’s
art is essentially about Being and like the Medieval Irish monks
he is not content with hiding away in an isolated cell in order to
fin enlightenment but is compulsively driven to travel, to
experience different cultures, different foods and different
natural environments – the more extreme the better.
Because
Eastaugh’s muse is experience, his ‘language’ is a necessary
hybrid of the familiar and the strange. Some images can be
‘read’ as signifiers of recognisable objects wile others are
abstract shapes that record and experience of thought that can not
be pinned down to more universal signs. Sometimes these abstract
shapes are even remembered images that are only recognisable to
the artist himself. The painting Drugs 1990, depicts a red
and white viscous blob against a black background, which records
an incident in Peru when his drink was spiked at a café and as he
collapsed into unconsciousness on the street outside he saw this
image on the pavement – perhaps a stain on the concrete or the
blurred outline of something else.
More
recently, his travels have taken him to extreme climates – the
excessive heat of the Australian desert and the excessive cold of
Greenland. Before heading off to Antarctica he spent about ten
weeks in Broome producing a series of work that could be
collectively titles “Hot”. Before Antarctica, Eastaugh’s
most recent experience with the extreme cold was on a five week
trip to Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) in 1993 which produced two
very different series of works. A series of small landscapes on
wood collectively titled Kalaallit Nunaat Studies and the
most purely abstract paintings he has ever produced collectively
titled Absolutions. These two series highlight extremes in
Eastaugh’s reaction to the visual phenomena of the ‘alien
landscape’ while the second attempts to capture the effect the
experience has on his head, his body and his soul. Throughout his
travels, Eastaugh has fed his soul with as much passion and lax
censorship as he has fed his body. Once he described his mouth as
a corrupt immigration officer guarding his stomach and it is with
the same non-judgmental quest for experiential knowledge (rather
than merely to satiate a hunger) that he contemplates the human
search for spiritual comfort. Sitting on a boat travelling up the
coast of Greenland, he experienced a ‘blankness’ that had
eluded him in his wide-eyed ‘pilgrimages to dumb deities’
around the world.
Perhaps
his most purely self-reflective series of paintings, Ablutions
consisted of wooden panels, sometimes minimally shaped and mostly
with all over texture of predominantly white or black surfaces.
While reminiscent of gravestones or commemorative plaques, each is
an abstracted self-portrait and a palimpsest both hiding and
revealing the ruminations of the soul before they are ordered by
language.
An
important shift in Eastaugh’s art has occurred between Kalaallit
Nunaat and his return to extreme cold seven years later. Before
1993, his painting were visualisations of his stories, his
personal dreamtime, mixing his experiences with stories told to
him by characters he has met on his travels. While still personal,
the ‘narrator’ was always a little removed from the
‘narration’; a sightseer, a tourist in an endless tour of the
weird and wonderful. The viewpoint of the narrator was outside
looking in. Quirky humour disguised the artist’s fear of the one
territory he had skirted around but never fully explored. He
started questioning himself as the nomadic voyeur and realising
that he was collecting experiences like a tourists collects
postcards.
A series
of work from 1997, painted, stitched and drawn on tarpaulin, were
first exhibited in an exhibition titles Continous Temporality.
This work is almost a mini retrospective of all of Eastaugh’s
previous ‘stories’ but here told from a more self-reflective
standpoint. Works like Religious Disaster Tours 1997, not
only speak about places he has visited and stories he has heard,
but also comments on his own fascination for seeking out such
places and stories. He questions both why the human population
behaves in these various ways and why he, the artist-traveller, is
so drawn to these places and stories. For the first time, the two
extremes of his imagery are combined in one
easily-rolled-up-and-carried body of work.
Having
gone though this retrospective, self-reflective stage, Eastaugh
was well prepared to face the new frontier of a land where the
indigenous population were penguins and the ‘squatters’ were
scientists removed from their natural environment and placed in
this artificial outpost that is a cross between an old-fashioned
frontier town and a futuristic space station.
--Michael
Wardell, Curatorial
Services Co-ordinator, Art Gallery of NSW.
© Stephen Eastaugh, 2007. All rights reserved.