Queensland

Judy Anderson, born 1961, lives and works on the Gold Coast. Her work is represented by Schubert Contemporary and the Queensland Centre for Photography.

She has held 12 solo exhibitions and numerous group shows in Australia and overseas, including South Korea and South Hampton New York. Judy Anderson has received an Arts Queensland RADF grant, a number of study and travel scholarships and is the recipient of numerous awards including the Conrad Jupiters’ Parks Victoria award.

She has conducted numerous artist residencies locally and interstate and in NY for the 2003 Global Neighbourhood Project. Her work is widely represented in public and private collections, interstate and overseas, including the Hyundai Arts Centre, Ulsan , South Korea; The Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne; The Parks Victoria Collection, Melbourne; The James Hardy Collection at the State Library of Queensland and the Gold Coast City Art Gallery Permanent Collection, among others.

She is currently completing a Phd in Visual arts and Cultural Theory, works as an arts educator at secondary and tertiary levels and as an arts writer. Her practice embodies photomedia, video, painting and drawing and artist books.

Her recent work explores light and surface as traces of passage in the form of palimpsests, installation, photographic imagery, video and back lit digitally manipulated transparencies. Emblems of embodiment and desire are configured from images of objects and felt surfaces as sites of transition and dissolution. Aspects of memory, lived experience and fragmented narrative are conveyed through processes such as erasure, multiple layering of images and text, and a collage aesthetic which emphasises materiality, tactility, loss and retrieval.

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The works in Judy Anderson’s A Place Opens mark their presence inside the rich textures of desire inscribed across the surface of each artifact. But the seductive force extends beyond the capabilities of visual description alone. There is something else that takes affect here. It’s a bodily excavation of sorts; that starts to begin from a place beyond language and representation. And it is the experience of sensing, of something that the body feels yet cannot say, that lingers beyond the visual mechanics of these works, permeating them with an obscure rhythm that seems to breathe from beyond each image.

Glimpsed in Anderson’s still images are the murmurs of every day objects, often made so unfamiliar that the source becomes close to unidentifiable. Elusive textures of porcelain and china cups are configured so that they come to resemble concaves and crevices of the female body; sometimes encased in netting and sometimes suspended in eerie patches of dark. The body that Anderson gestures toward here is a body in process: fragmented and incomplete. It opens, folds back on itself and re-opens, offering a multiplicity of entry points that indicate possibility rather than closure. Its fleshy texture appears to hide and invite simultaneously, and in doing so evokes the openness and secrecy of what is both above and underneath the skin.

Leaking into these objects, transparent stains of brushstrokes suggest that Anderson undertakes a rigorous process of experimentation with more traditional media in the studio, before digitally working through her photographic compositions. Some of these works are printed on cotton paper, and the soft, chalky appearance of the prints obscures the differentiation between painting, photography and digital imaging. Even in the light boxes and video work these media are seamlessly interwoven and built up in washed out layers that reveal the different transitional phases of each image. These transitions bear a dreamy resemblance to the passing of time, but rather than being conceptualized in the Western, linear sense, in Anderson’s still and moving images time becomes spatial and dispersed. Looking into the video work almost induces a feeling of being able to see the past, present and future simultaneously – though the objects that fill these blurred tenses are only able to be partially deciphered with the use of dominant signifying systems. In many respects they emerge from their own time and place entirely: perhaps an ‘other’ ineffable moment, for which there are no words.

Opening out from the flat surfaces of the digital works are fetishized sculptural forms, hanging eerily in calm procedures, almost ghost-like and transcendental in nature. Viewing these objects, whose traces are reconfigured, reverberated and evoked in the digital works included in the exhibition, reminds one that any concrete mode of analysis is a futile, if not irrelevant undertaking in the digital age. Instead, we feel these objects as elusive, never able to say exactly what they mean or what they are. This is because meaning is only ever an echo that occurs through each object’s shape shifting process as it continues through its various identities, either as a real material thing that is installed in the space of the gallery, or as the ephemeral trace of a material form that is experienced through the transient presence these objects induce in the still and moving digital imagery. Being with these objects and their various spectral traces in the gallery environment induces a sense of time repeating, resonating, unfolding and then folding again.

Erotic and intense, the still and moving images and objects in A Place Opens are fevered with a mystical depth that shifts across and beyond each visual plane. Somewhere in between Anderson’s lush tactile images and this un-inscribable state that they conjure, a place opens. It could be said that this place is caught between the poles of remembering and forgetting what something means, of knowing and not being able to find the words to know what to say. The indistinct spaces in between these poles that allow one to pause in a quiet moment of contemplation are just as significant as what is uncovered. These are spaces that can be described, but the saying will always be distanced from experiencing them first hand. Such experiencing allows for movement beyond the work, an entry point in which to marvel at the silence and hushed noise that it illuminates.

Sarah-Mace Dennis is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher.