Ephemeral interactions and cognitive dissonances ― Claire Anna Watson’s Reverie

In the Finnish winter of 2008, in the small town of Haukivuori, a stand of birches sprouts pale green ‘epiphytes’: twenty-five cabbages carefully attached to the delicate trees. In Evoramonte, Portugal, in 2010, a pomegranate tree’s harvest mysteriously expands to include strawberries and bananas; an olive tree grows a crop of plastic ravens; and by a river, schools of trout dangle absurdly from twisted, overhanging branches.

Were these dreams? Not dreams, but a Reverie: “a state of fanciful musing”[1] brought on by the unusual products of artist Claire Anna Watson’s fertile imagination. As this latest exhibition makes clear with playful abundance, Watson’s work encompasses the delightfully absurd and the darkly visceral, creating a world where ‘order and caprice’[2] fit hand-in-glove.

Reverie brings together several key works from the past four years of Watson’s practice, allowing Australian viewers to experience some of her site-specific interventions via large, lush Type C photos of these ephemeral works. The artist sets out to recontextualise our relationship to the foods we eat; and in the three videos in Reverie sheds unexpected light on the humble pineapple, cabbage and strawberry; while a new installation work, Harvest, extends earlier meditations on that most artificial of foods, the jellybean.

The Epiphyte series (2008) suggests whimsy rather than parasitism, with the curious, cabbage-adorned birches seeming to express a strange natural order. Almost glowing in the pale winter light beneath a lacework of high twigs, the symbiotic cabbages assert their eerie presence against the slender vulnerability of the young trees; the crisp, round heads appearing to float in the cold air. Watson conceived the intervention after seeing hundreds of cabbages stored in a local coolroom; passing by the ubiquitous Finnish birch forests, a “virtual montage”[3] formed in her mind. But far from being a simplistic comment on mass agricultural production, Epiphyte brings to life a mysterious ‘colony’ in the forest, and a moment of curious questioning for the onlooker.

The Tree Studies (2010) document two among several dislocations of the everyday created by Watson as part of her 2010 artist residency at Foundation OBRAS, in Evoramonte, Portugal. As Jane O’Neill notes in a previous catalogue essay, Watson is fascinated with “the contrast between the inherent order of nature and the order imposed by humanity”.[4] While Epiphyte’s order seems almost ‘natural’, the sight of skyward-pointing artificial trout dangling from Evoramonte’s trees is patently surreal, while resonating with the perpendicular of a fish drawn up from the sea on a line. Here in the gallery, her cream-bellied ‘fruits-de-mer’ amid muted foliage are juxtaposed with a second Tree Study, a larger-than-life close-up of another Evoramonte intervention, whose ripe strawberries pulse with colour against vivid blue sky. In a cheekily extreme ‘re-re-commodification’ of the original fruit, Watson’s saturated metallic-print strawberry-tree outdoes the glossiest of advertising posters. The result is strikingly artificial, and mouth-watering.

In its intimate exploration of everyday food items, Watson’s Reverie steps beyond dream into nightmare, with the beautifully visceral Sortie (2009). The medium of video activates multiple senses, and in the case of Sortie immerses the viewer in a “site of torment and darkness”,[5] as a pair of surgical tweezers plucks the seeds from a ripe strawberry in horrifying close-up, each minute act of violence concluded by the metal-and-porcelain click as the seed is tapped, off-screen, into a dish. “Food has the potential to evoke not only life, but also death,” says Watson. “Like the human being, its existence is transitory”.[6] Growing reckless, the tweezers strike increasingly savagely at the helpless fruit, which appears, at one point, to actively recoil from the destruction. By the end of the video the fruit is reduced to bruised and bloodied fragments.

More clinically, in Endocardium (2010) Watson investigates a cabbage, searching for its knobbled heart. Like Sortie, Endocardium is accompanied by a disturbing soundscape of dark rumblings and reverberations – the super-amplified diegetic sounds of camera, rustling clothing, and in this case the squeaks and cracks of surgical gloves and snapped-off leaves. Under harsh white light, Watson creates an unsettling distance between her exploratory experience and the “natural matter” upon which she works, highlighting the disjunctures between the way we experience and “know” food.[7]

Pineapples for Piscina (2007) was originally an installation featuring various objects related to both fishing and pineapples, chronicling the artist’s effort to ‘fish for meaning’ as both consumer and artist.[8] In Reverie, Watson revisits the work, recontextualising two elements: a video of the hapless or heroic[9] pineapple, bobbing in the sea; and the improbably blue-painted pineapple head, resting in sand like a fantastical porcupine. Across these two pieces, Watson’s concerns can be seen extending from the prosaic to the poetic. While the video is so immediate, so utterly local, the photograph seems to express a metaphoric and elusive logic as the long, animate spines reach out like protoplasmic limbs towards both ground and sky.

While the highly-processed jellybean might seem at odds with the ‘natural world’ of Watson’s fruits and vegetables, it provides the artist with a rich symbol for what she calls “the age of selection”,[10] in which humans in developed countries exercise almost-endless choice in what they consume. A new work created specially for Reverie, Harvest selects the black jellybean – most-loved or most-reviled among all jellybean ‘types’ – and formally displays it in the gallery space; where it resonates unexpectedly with the deep blue of Watson’s pineapple head, the multiplicity of her crowds of fish and clusters of cabbages, and the rich black background of Sortie. “Harvest represents a manmade food source,” says Watson. “It mimics commercial mass production, laid out on a conveyor belt destined for packaging. The sense of repetition and consumerist production is quite unlike the naturalistic interventions of other works. Yet it shares a sense of the absurd.”[11]

Watson’s works both charm and disturb; their gentle absurdity brings to notice a crucial part of the world around us: the food that we eat. In Reverie, we gain the opportunity to participate in an artist’s “phenomenology of food” and to renew our relationship to what we consume; exploring our own lived experience through the “cognitive dissonances” that Watson so delightfully presents. [12]

Urszula Dawkins

March 2011

Published by: Gippsland Art Gallery, Sale

Exhibition Dates: 2 April – 15 May

---

[1] C Yallop, JRL Bernard, D Blair, S Butler, A Delbridge, P Peters, N Witton (eds), Macquarie Dictionary, 4th Edition. Macquarie Dictionary Publishers: Sydney 2005, p. 1211

[2] Order and Caprice is the title of a series of previous works by Claire Anna Watson; she describes her new work Harvest as, in a sense, an appendix to the series.

[3] Artist’s statement, 2008

[4] Jane O’Neill, catalogue essay, Ephemeral Works 2005–2008. Claire Anna Watson at Counihan Gallery, Brunswick, 2008

[5] Artist’s statement, 2010

[6] Emailed interview with the artist, 14 March 2011

[7] Emailed interview with the artist, 14 March 2011

[8] Artist’s statement, 2008

[9] ‘Heroic’ suggested by Robert Nelson in his review of Ephemeral Works 2005–2008 at Counihan Gallery, Brunswick, ‘Breathing heroic and sinister life into the inert lump’, (The Age, 5 November 2008)

[10] Artist’s statement, 2011

[11] Emailed interview with the artist, 14 March 2011

[12] Emailed interview with the artist, 14 March 2011