Nell
Sydney
2017
Displayed 2017 at Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
Nell
Born 1975, Maitland, New South Wales. Lives and works Sydney
Nell’s practice traverses performance, sculpture, music and painting. Small, intimate objects are just as probable as immersive installations. Nell’s work deals with birth and death. Her great love of rock ‘n’ roll and small joys manifests in artworks that are everyday meditations on what it means to stay familiar with the certainty of your own mortality.
Artist text
by Talia Linz
Many historical paintings of mother and child depict the archetypal pairing of the Madonna and Christ, with her body supporting his either as cherubic child or as limp figure post-crucifixion. Nell’s Mother of the Dry Tree (2017) is an unusual portrait of a mother and son that draws on this biblical coupling but refracts it through the artist’s own lens. In place of human figures are Nell’s characteristic oval forms: a pale-faced mother balances in the tree’s fork, while a smaller glowing, spectral creature floats above. With mouths agape, mother and child seem to call to each other across the dark void; like its historical precedents, this contemporary version, too, contains love and loss.
With an artistic practice that spans over 20 years, Nell’s idiosyncratic visual vocabulary unites influences as diverse as Zen Buddhist teaching with the rural landscape of her youth, artistic predecessors including Colin McCahon and Lucio Fontana and her beloved rock ‘n’ roll. Employing a largely monochromatic palette marked by flares of colour, her work consciously highlights the possibilities between absolutes or extreme positions: life and death, happiness and grief, ancient and contemporary, religious and secular, so-called high art and the everyday.
Nell’s painting resonates compositionally with Petrus Christus’ tiny 15th-century oil painting The Virgin of the dry Tree (c.1465), now held in the collection of the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. A remarkably original work for its time, Christus’ piece was likely commissioned for private devotion and blends references to both pagan and Christian worship. Nell’s, similarly, alludes to her own blended spiritual practice and personal philosophy about gratitude and appreciation for the little things in life, with a strong dose of humour thrown in for good measure. Nell’s egg-shaped figures take a primal, universal shape that suggests creation and the potential for life – fragile and robust at the same time. Believed to be a reference to the traditional Catholic prayer, the Ave Maria, the golden As of the original here hang in AC/DC’s distinctive font, drawing a deeply felt connection between music and spirituality.
Part of Nell’s new work for The National 2017: New Australian Art is the mixed-media installation With things being as they are … (2017), a collection of beings and objects occupying a series of tatami mats, traditional Japanese floor coverings that here serve as alternative plinths for her creations. In keeping with the artist’s interest in moving between two and three dimensions, one painted form seems to have pierced its illusionistic skin and materialised in the gallery space, among a cast of others. From the friendly golden faeces to the smiley garbage can and the masked ghost, each anthropomorphised form is simple in design but full of personality, of spirit. And, again, in this collision of unlikely things we find allusions to the centrality of music – gold-tipped drumsticks, AC/DC’s lightning bolt – laid carefully, as if offerings to the gods of rock.
NELL on Mother of the Dry Tree
10min
Nell’s work for The National was supported by an Artspace Studio Residency