Angela Valamanesh

Once again my work takes its cue from scientific illustration, in particular the world of the microscopic.  Airborne, 2011, is based on images of pollen grains.  Seemingly infinite in their variety, each flowering plant requiring pollination by a specific grain, they were first observed and illustrated with the aid of a microscope in the 1600’s by botanists such as Nehemiah Grew.  Ferdinand Bauer’s more recent watercolours painted in the mid 1800’s are, like Grew’s images, still recognisable as the same material portrayed with the use of today’s electron microscope.

In Airborne the cavity formed by plaster casting of a solid form acknowledges transience and loss, impermanence.  Every living flowering plant has had a different pollen grain and the study of extinct flora includes the study of fossilised pollen grains, paleopalynology.  With this in mind I set about making a visual representation of a minute fraction of the invisible material surrounding us:  the world in which we are embedded.

Apart from pollen grains, the other microscopic material represented in this exhibition is the parasite.  Again, of startling variety, and offcourse not always microscopic, parasites, both plant and animal, according to ABC Radio National’s Natasha Mitchell of All in the Mind constitute half of life on earth.  We need some parasites, although not all, and probably not those that manipulate the behaviour of their hosts by co-opting their brains. 

The Earthly garden series with its combination of ceramic and watercolour on paper again relies on the transformation of scientific illustration.  Echoing the phenomenon of collecting, naming, describing, ordering and classifying, ultimately an impossible task when one takes into account the predominance of microscopic life around us and the extinction of many life-forms,the works take the form of poetic distillations.

Angela Valamanesh, April 2012

'There is no science without fancy, and no art without fact.' Vladimir Nabokov

The works for this exhibition are all drawn from images of microscopic life, most of which come from early scientific illustration, from sources such as the Barr Smith Library’s Special Collection. Some are more clearly identifiable than others. I am interested in the interconnectedness of life and the potential of a union between science and poetry, the rational and the irrational, formal and symbolic.

A little bit of everything, an on-going series, is perhaps more directly related to rare book collections. Apart from the text and images contained within the early publications, the physical quality of the paper, often slightly buckled and dotted with age spots, like old skin, is fascinating. Watercolour on paper is a completely different process than making objects from clay but there are some similarities such as the transformation of material from wet to dry and the surprises that arise due to the unpredictable qualities of both materials.

Angela Valamanesh

'The series ‘Animal, Vegetable, Mineral’ 2007 grew from my observations of human anatomy as presented in medical and anatomical atlases that depict views of our bodies not normally seen by us. I became interested in how little we know of our bodies and how visually similar some of our body parts are to plants: root vegetables or cauliflowers!

Anatomical studies have been used extensively by artists over the years especially as reference points for figurative sculpture and portrait painting but early anatomists also made three dimensional wax models of body parts as teaching aids and these surprisingly durable and beautiful objects have also been inspirational.

More recently the imagery in my work has included enlargements of microscopic organisms. The work usually begins with what I think is an interesting image, sometimes developed from a drawing or photograph to a three dimensional form and scale which feels right. Often this will suggest the next object and a sequence is usually configured before all the finished pieces are in place.

The practice of building groups or arrangements has existed in my work for a number of years now and their linear qualities still remind me of the way letters form words or sentences on a page. Also in this more recent work the reference to the way
specimens in collections are often presented to us is perhaps relevant.

Somehow the use of clay as the media for constructing these forms feels appropriate to the subject matter, something to do with it being such a common material that we are all connected to.

Angela Valamanesh, July 2007